EARLY CHINESE PRINTING.

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Gujin fo dao lunheng shilu ("A Veritable Record of Past and Present Buddhist and Daoist Debates"). A survival of early Chinese efforts to propagate a printed Buddhist canon, produced from woodblocks carved in the late 11th or early 12th century in Fuzhou, where two of the city's leading temples each sponsored a monumental edition of Buddhist learning. Today, volumes from either edition are highly prized cultural objects in Chinese and Japanese libraries, where the overwhelming majority of extant examples are permanently housed.The first Chinese woodblock edition of the Buddhist canon was carved in the 10th century, and several others soon followed. Fuzhou is known for two large-scale canon projects that were executed at the city's Dongchan and Kaiyuan temples in 1080-1112 and 1112-1151 respectively. Both involved dozens of artisans carving blocks for thousands of volumes. Complete sets were dispersed to temple libraries for devotional and scholarly use. Today, the editions are named the Dongchan Canon (also known as the Chongning Canon) and the Kaiyuan Canon (also known as the Pilu Canon), and they serve as indispensable sources for historians of early print culture and the growth of Buddhism in Asia.This example is from one of the two. Both editions were carved with a similar appearance and text frames of roughly the same size, and there is evidence that the engravers of the Kaiyuan edition used the Dongchan edition as a model. These factors, combined with the fact that only

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