The theme of Lewis Lancaster’s academic career has consistently been the Buddhist canon—the processes of its compilation, its preservation, and its interpretation. This work has extended from his earliest studies of the history of the Prajnaparamita literature to his most recent efforts to promote the electronic preservation of the canon. This panel in honor of his retirement from Berkeley reflects Professor Lancaster’s lifelong devotion to the canon through the work of four of his students.

The panel will offer papers that, from various angles, seek to recover some of the historical contexts of the East Asian Buddhist canon. Two papers will deal with early efforts to preserve the canon in China (Williams) and Japan (Tokuno), and with the social and religious factors behind such efforts. A third paper (Park) will revisit one text studied by Professor Lancaster, the famous Tun-huang Platform Satra, and explore the relationship between its original intellectual context and our modern readings of it. The fourth paper (Buswell) examines the critical assumptions of the compilers of the Koryo canon and explores the degree to which this influential version of scripture, used as the basis for the standard modern Taisho edition, was itself a critical edition in the modern sense.

Each of these papers touches a topic close to Professor Lancaster’s work. Taken together, they form a panel that emphasizes the centrality of scripture and canon in the history of East Asian Buddhism and hence in our own efforts to understand that history.

Robert Buswell, University of California, Los Angeles

Of all aspects of the Korean Buddhist tradition, the Koryo Buddhist canon has elicited the most interest. Emulating their Northern Sung predecessors, the Koreans began carving the Tripitaka in 1011, though it was destroyed during the Mongol invasion. Its replacement, carved between 1236–1251, is the only complete canon extant on the Asian mainland.

Scholars have lauded this Tripitaka for its high editorial standards from 1904, when Sekino Sada first published scholarly accounts of this canon outside Korea, through Lewis Lancaster’s compilation of one of the two major catalogues of the collection.

Despite recognition of the canon’s editorial quality, Sugi’s Supplementary Record of Collation Notes to the New Carving of the Great Canon of the Koryo Kingdom (Koryo-guk sinjo taejang kyojong pyollok) which documents its compilation, has received little attention.

Sugi precisely records variant textual readings, documenting the genealogies of the East Asian Buddhist canons. Sugi’s Collation Notes also reveal the text-critical methodologies used by editors of Buddhist texts. By modern standards, Sugi qualifies as a competent, sophisticated editor, adhering to the major canons of internal evidence. Avoiding the early errors of Western textual critics, he shows flexibility and intuition in his editing. This is even more remarkable since he worked centuries before the West even became aware of the problems involved in critically editing a sacred text. Sugi’s information also allows us to extrapolate back into earlier canons, revealing that virtually all East Asian Buddhist canons followed guidelines similar to Sugi’s.

Sung-Bae Park, SUNY Stony Brook

Despite its traditionally ambivalent attitude toward the Buddhist textual tradition, the Ch’an (Korean: Son, Japanese: Zen) sect has long awarded the Platform Sutra an exceptional status. This is especially true in Korean Buddhism, which is dominated by Son and, in particular, the Sudden Enlightenment doctrine of the Southern School. For much of its history, the Son school depended on a later version of the sutra, dating from the Chinese Sung Dynasty. Only in the 20th century has the earlier Tun-huang version been widely disseminated. This version was translated into Korean by the monk Songchol, who was head of the Son order at the time, and into English by Wing-tsit Chan (1960) and Philip Yampolsky (1967).

These modern translations of the Tun-huang text have had considerable impact on our understanding of early Ch’an thought—a development foreseen twenty-five years ago in Lewis Lancaster’s review of the state of Platform Sutra scholarship. Yet much work still remains to be done on the interpretation of the original text itself; and in fact the current translations leave much to be desired in their understandings of such key concepts as the famous doctrine of "no-thought." This paper will consider issues in the interpretation of the text and offer a new reading of its philosophical and soteriological message, based on the sutra’s central hermeneutic paradigm of "substance and function" (t’i-yung).

Kyoko Tokuno, University of Oregon

The ritual burial of Buddhist scriptures in Japan became widespread during the late Heian period and continued for centuries thereafter. Archeology has now uncovered some twenty-two hundred sites of such burials throughout the Japanese islands. Most of these sites have yielded texts copied on the standard medium of paper rolls, but at several locations we also find an unusual type, known as gakyō, or "tile sutras," that were inscribed on low-fired clay tablets. This paper will focus on the findings at several Heian-period twelfth-century sites that have together yielded approximately one thousand such tiles.

Fortunately, many of the burial sites have included dedicatory inscriptions (ganmon) recording the identity of the donors and their motives for the ritual burials. At many sites, it is clear both from these inscriptions and the choice of text that the burial practice was closely associated especially with devotion to the Lotus Sutra. Yet in the case of the tile sutra sites, the evidence of the inscriptions, the relatively wide range of texts selected for burial, and the choice of the more enduring clay medium all suggest that the motive here was especially the preservation of the Buddhist canon for later ages.

The paper will explore the social, historical, and religious contexts within which the Japanese practice of burying tile sutras developed. It will then seek to compare this practice with earlier efforts to preserve the canon, such as the rock cut canon at Fang-shan studied by Lewis Lancaster.

Bruce C. Williams, University of California, Berkeley and The Institute of Buddhist Studies, GTU

Scattered throughout North and Northeastern China are more than a dozen cave temples, whose histories reach back to the mid-sixth century c.e., and which contain inscriptions and inscribed Buddhist sutras. Unique among these is Yunjusi, the site of the Stone Canon of Fangshan which has been studied by Lewis Lancaster. The site is approximately 70 kilometers southwest of Beijing. The carving of this stone canon was inaugurated by the Buddhist monk Jingwan, the founder of Yunjusi, and his disciples as a means of preserving the Buddhist teachings. In a recent important study of the Stone Canon at Fangshan Kegasawa Yasunori has argued that the carving of this stone canon differed essentially from the carving of sutras at the other cave temples.