AAS 2014 Book Highlight! The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka

Praise for The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography:

“Highly recommended for scholars and students studying Buddhism, history of the Chinese book, and comparative religion.” – Jiang Wu, University of Arizona

“This highly accessible book is not only helpful to the nonspecialists in Buddhism but also to Buddhist scholars who are interested in how and why differing versions of the Buddhist canon came into existence.” – Rita M. Gross, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire

An excerpt from The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography:
Buddhist catalogs in China developed under the influence of a rich tradition of cataloging the Confucian classics and Chinese national literature, a tradition that started long before Buddhist scriptures were first translated into Chinese. Beginning with the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), book cataloging came to be viewed as a highly respectable field of knowledge and a task worthy of the most distinguished historians. Particularly, under the influence of two historians, Liu Xiang (79–8 BCE) and Ban Gu (32–92 CE), knowledge about books both lost and preserved, dynasties under whose rule books were written, and the lives of their authors became indispensable information—knowledge believed to have contributed to the advancement of civilization itself. … During the second half of the fourth century, when Buddhist scholars in China began seriously examining the authenticity of their scriptural canon, they did not simply address the problems of its translation; they aimed to elevate its sociocultural status to the heights that the Confucian classics had enjoyed for centuries before the first Chinese translations of Buddhist teachings were produced.

This book has been published just in time for the AAS and will be on display at Cambria Press booth #302 (right in front of the exhibit hall entrance)
at the 2014 Association of Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in Philadelphia.

MEET THE AUTHOR! Dr. Storch will be speaking at the AAS book launch session (room 407) on Friday (March 28) at 7:30 p.m.

Check out the 2014 Cambria Press Asian studies catalog and download the booklist for your librarian.

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