Fan Xiangyong argues that there are two versions of Hsuanchuang’s Datang Xiyuji (Western Regions’ Records during the Great Tang Dynasty). He hypothesizes that one was the text that Hsuanchuang officially presented to Emperor Taizong in July of the 20th year of Zhenguan (646) and that the other was an amended edition, written under Emperor Gaozong’s orders during the first year of Xianqing (656). He suggests that missing Datang Xiyuji texts are often discovered among T’ang-period works and these texts are those of Hsuanchuang’s official text. Nevertheless, the amendments of the first year of Xianqing could not have been on such a large scale as Fan imagines. In this paper, the author claims that the missing texts are a part of the manuscript executed by Bianji; the amendments done during the first year of Xianqing were merely a simple embellishment of the text. The evidence for this theory is the fact that these missing texts appear only in the works of monks such as Daoxuan and Xuanying, who participated in Hsuanchuang’s workshops of translating Buddhist scriptures. As for the actual contents of the amended version written during the first year of Xianqing, the author argues that we can learn something through comparing the text of old Japanese manuscripts with existing editions of the Chinese Tripitaka.
