The earliest stages in the development of Chinese Buddhist exegesis: A report on a work in progress

26/03/2010 - 16:00

26 March 2010

Venue: Lipsius (room 147), Cleveringaplaats 1, Leiden


Buddhist Studies Lecture by Stefano Zacchetti (Dipartimento di Studi sull’Asia Orientale, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of commentaries in the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism, and yet it is fair to say that the origins and early developments of this genre have not received the attention they deserve. Recent discoveries of manuscripts in Chinese (at the Kongō-ji temple) and Gāndhārī (especially the fragmentary commentary belonging to the British Library Collection recently edited and studied by S. Baums) allow us to see this subject in a new light. We are now able to better understand the complex background of the commentaries produced during the Han and Three Kingdom periods, and to pin down the influence of Indian exegetical tradition on one hand, and of Chinese indigenous developments on the other. This lecture discusses the typologies and exegetical techniques of the surviving Buddhist commentaries composed in China during the II and III century CE.