The Feng-tao k'o and Printing on Paper in Seventh-Century China

Abstract

One of the arguments for supposing that the ‘world's earliest printed book’, the Diamond Sūtra in the Stein collection in London, is actually the outcome of a long process of development relies on the very high quality of the images contained in the frontispiece. It is possible, of course, to point to much more crudely formed Buddha images stamped on paper from the same source at Tunhuang, but the dated examples that have been studied are actually later than the Stein Diamond Sūtra itself.1 The practice of printing Buddha images on paper and silk in India is attested in 792 by the Nan-hai chi-kuei nei-fa chuan of I-ching who was in India 673–85, and Paul Pelliot for one was prepared to believe that this practice, using Chinese materials, was originally derived from China itself.2 Frustratingly enough, however, no Chinese source has so far been identified which clearly mentions printing on paper at any point earlier than I-ching's text, which itself does not antedate by more than half a century or so the earliest printed materials we actually possess, notably in the form of a dharaṇī from Korea.3