As a collected poetry of Chan masters, Chanzong Zaduhai has a distinguishing feature on its classification categories based on topics of poems which is very different from other collected poetries, usually compiled in the order of chronologic poets or various subgenres. This article includes two perspectives in the research on Chanzong Zaduhai: its contents and subgenre changes.Firstly, the poetry has been edited for at least three times from early-Ming to early-Qing. By poring over the titles of categories, it reveals that there are considerable amount of poems concerning daily life or religious rituals in monastic communities and many of them originating from “ Yulu” (masters’ recorded sayings). Nonetheless, the Qing dynasty version, besides the functional poems, also covers new categories including others works about religious practices or one’ s enlightened moments which reflected the development of Chan poems from Yuan to Qing. Secondly, this article also investigates how the classification categories used in Chanzong Zaduhai emerged in the history of Chan literature. In the evolution of different Chan subgenres such as “Denglu”, “Songguji”, “Jisongji” and collected tracts, some of the poems originally linked together with recorded sayings or related stories, a.k.a. “ Ji yuan”, were selected into separate collections. At the same time, due to the great amount of recorded sayings and the internal demands within different schools, some editors tended to classify these works into different model classes since Yuan dynasty. In short, there are two compilation principles in Chanzong Zaduhai: 1. Poems picked-up independently from recorded sayings and 2. the classification categories. That led to the formation of Chanzong Zaduhai as a prominent role in the history of Chan literature.
