BUDDHISM.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Saddharmasmrtyupasthanasutra ("Sutra of Right Mindfulness"). A surviving fascicle from a famous early Chinese edition of the Buddhist canon, printed during the Song dynasty at the Yuanjue (later Zifu) temple in Huzhou. The respect given to Buddhists texts has ensured the institutional survival of a couple of near-complete Yuanjue sets, but any examples of Chinese printing of this age are exceptionally scarce in commerce. We have traced only three works on paper printed before 1300 in Western auctions since 1980.Multiple characteristics suggest that this particular example is from the Yuanjue edition. Phonetic glosses at the end, the size of the printed area, and the number of pages, columns, and characters per sheet are consistent with other examples. The first sheet also gives the name of the block carver as Shi Hong. A carver of the same name was active in the Huzhou region during the Southern Song period and was involved in other projects, including editions of the Shuijing zhu (an ancient geographical treatise) and the Lotus Sutra.Carving of the blocks for the Yuanjue edition commenced at some point between the 1110s and 1140s. The blocks were used to print copies until being burned by Mongol invaders in 1276. Subsequently, this edition was unknown in China until the bibliophile Yang Shoujing (1839-1915) brought an almost complete set back from Japan in the late 19th century.Li & He write that surviving volumes from the Yuanjue edition "are already very rare in China". Ne

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