《開寶藏》成都雕造考

From Manuscript to Print: The Carving of the Kaibao Canon in Tenth Century Chengdu

The importance of the first printed edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, the Kaibao Canon 開寶藏, cannot be overestimated. Based on previous scholarship and our examination of various local sources such as Huibao's 慧寶 annotation of Shenqing's 神清Record of Northern Mountain (Beishanlu 北山錄), we intend to reintroduce this important canon to the scholarly world as a significant religious, political, and social innovation in Chinese history. In this paper, we focus on the process of its carving and printing in Chengdu at the end of the tenth century. We propose the hypothesis that the Kaibao Canon was carved in Chengdu under the supervision of a monastic institution, most likely, Jingzhong Monastery 淨眾寺. In sum, we situate the Canon within the widespread print culture of the Tang and Song dynasties and provide a new account of how the use of printing gave birth to the first printed Buddhist canon in East Asian history.