Contingent and Contested: Preliminary Remarks on Buddhist Catalogs and Canons in Early Japan

Abstract

This article explores the notion of the Buddhist in seventh- and eighth-century Japan. It relies on scriptorium documents, temple records, and manuscripts of catalogs to argue that there was no single Buddhist in ancient Japan; each was created at a particular moment in a unique configuration to respond to the needs of the patron and the monastic community. For this reason, Buddhist canons in the Japanese case are best understood in the plural. But rather than simply focusing on what the was as a noun, this article examines the dynamic processes through which canons were produced as systematized collections of texts. It shows how monks, rulers, and administrators in the capital consulted continental catalogs but were never bound by them. Canon provided a means for individuals at court to demonstrate their mastery over the Buddhist tradition.keywords: canon-catalog-Shosoin-sutra copying-Nara Buddhism-Genbo(ProQuest: Foreign text omitted.)According to the Continued Chronicles of Japan (Shoku Nihongi 6/18/746; snkbt 14: 28-31), the Japanese monk Genbo ... (?-746) returned to his homeland in 735 with some 5,000 scrolls of Buddhist sutras after spending nearly twenty years in China. Because this number is close to the 5,048 scrolls deemed canonical by the Kaiyuan Catalog1-a Chinese text that set the standard for the contents and organization of the throughout East Asia- scholars for many years assumed that Genbo imported the entire Tang Buddhist canon. More recent research has suggested that this was likely not the case. In fact, Genbo was quite selective, choosing works that accorded with his interests and only collecting about half of the titles in the Kaiyuan Catalog during his time abroad.2 Amongst the thousands of scrolls that Genbo did return with, the Kaiyuan Catalog itself arguably had a larger impact on Japanese Buddhism than any other title. The arrival of this text introduced a state-of-the-art continental definition of canonicity to the Japanese court. This was a concept that the royals sponsoring canon-copying projects could not ignore but also never fully obeyed.The case of Genbo and the large scale transcription efforts that followed his return shed light on issues that are central to the study of Japanese religions, Buddhology, and religious studies. The period from 651, when the term canon (issaikyo - ... ) first appears in Japanese historical records, through the end of the eighth century, represents a time of unprecedented interest in the in Japan.3 During this time, textual production exploded; extant Buddhist works climbed from around 2,000 unique scrolls of scripture to titles totaling nearly 7,000 scrolls. Records from court circles alone cite twenty canon-copying projects from the Nara period, a pace of one every three to four years and roughly 100,000 scrolls altogether. The designation constant copying (josha ... ), which was used to refer to transcription in documents from an officially sanctioned sutra-copying office, proved apt; the bureau was almost always transcribing canons throughout its nearly fifty-year history. Copying canons was, in fact, the primary job of the official sutra-copying bureaus.4 In order to understand early Japanese Buddhism, therefore, one must account for one of the era's most central practices: transcription.5In Buddhist studies, the stakes in defining the are particularly high. While recent research has highlighted the importance of scriptures problematically referred to as apocrypha, a topic I will return to in this article, Buddhology, as a field, remains grounded in texts deemed canonical by early Buddhist councils, medieval monks, and modern scholars. This attention to canonical works is appropriate; these texts have played a central role in shaping the tradition from the past to the present day. Even research into so-called apocryphal works requires an understanding of the contours of the Buddhist canon. …