In Yong-Hai Lai's fifteen volume anthology "Chinese Buddhism History" that was published in November 2010, the collection has taken the interest of Chinese’s academic community: the content is magnanimous, the structure complex, and a fully comprehensive history , he has fulfilled the wish of several generations of Chinese historians by plugging the holes of history that had been previously left blank. He has also increased Buddhism studies on an international level and have become the focal point of Chinese Buddhism studies. However, during the editing process, the author realized that therv was a fundamental problem in the structure of the anthology in which the time line was skewed and the history of Buddhism in the last 100 years did not fully cover the development and changes, particularly that of Taiwanese Buddhism, nor of Buddhism pre-1912. Also information concerning the post-1949 PRC and the civil war was also missing. The author believed that to create an ideal text, that not only does he have to emulate Chinese historians in America such as the Cambridge Chinese History, but he should also use the latest research results to reach a modern standard for research. In this ideal Chinese Buddhism text, besides properly organizing the information, no matter what the topic is, that there must be “innovative research”. Only then will it give the experts in the field a proper context, and also make sense to the ordinary reader. Overall, an anthology, to Yong-Hai Lai, does not simply require quantity, but also be a living, breathing organism in that the anthology should be able to take in these new research methods to come to a conclusion. As for the Chinese Buddhist History, it cannot stray away from this fundamental point.
