I argue that medieval Chinese Buddhists composed anthologies like A Grove of Pearls from the Garden of Dharma (seventh century CE) to make productive use of the Buddhist canon’s immense scale. By tracing how anthologists produce extracts from the canon, I show how anthologies make canon practicable, drawing a distinction between practical and formal canons in the process. I do this by first charting how a collection of extracts (titled “Bathing Monks”) in A Grove of Pearls economizes diverse canonical source materials to affirm both the canon’s difficulty and relevance. Then I outline how the extracts of “Bathing Monks” were further economized in a single-page manuscript preserved in the Dunhuang cache (tenth century or earlier). My findings suggest that religious anthologies be regarded by scholars of religion not only as textual repositories but also as objects that encourage the religious to mine vast canons and whittle down holy text for use. In the case of medieval Chinese Buddhist anthologies, Buddhist ideas about dharma’s fluidity and usefulness flourished in a burgeoning manuscript culture in medieval China.
目次
Abstract From “Practical Canon” to “Making Canon Practicable” 318 Citation and Quotation 326 “Bathing the Sangha” as a Collection of Extracts 327 Manuscript S. 4647 as “Bathing the Sangha” Scaled Down and Emended 351 Canon Made Practicable: The Affordances of Anthology 358 Notes
