Anyone starting research into Chinese Buddhism, whatever area of interest attracts one's attention, soon learns that the fifty-fifth volume of the Buddhist canon in its modern Japanese edition is completely indispensable. For that is where all the catalogues of Buddhist texts compiled over the centuries in China are gathered together, creating a formidable – and now digitized – resource. But getting across to outsiders the staggering achievements of Buddhist bibliographers is no easy task. This book addresses that problem fairly and squarely, adducing for comparative purposes the formation of the Christian canon, though in fact Christians had to deal with a much more restricted range of literature, even if one considers also the rather large quantity of would-be canonical Christian texts that fell by the wayside and never made it into the canon. Central to the story in China, in light of the much greater demands made by the much larger number of texts involved, is the whole question of classification, the erection of subdivisions of the canon that could be used to divide and conquer the vast amorphous mass of translations and supposed translations. For in China, too, the discriminating bibliographic eye soon detected scriptures masquerading as words of the Buddha that spoke with a distinctively, even alluringly, Chinese voice. Tanya Storch's book is not in itself a bibliographic aid, since the Chinese characters necessary for any detailed discussion of the value of specific texts are confined to one appendix. This rather frustrates any attempts at, for example, defending the reputation of the profoundly unreliable bibliographer Fei Changfang (p. 24), though were it intended to push such a project forward, it would be necessary to consult the study of Fei's historiography and its context carried out by Max Deeg in Peter Schalk et al. (eds), Geschichten und Geschichte: Historiographie und Hagiographie in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2010), pp. 96–139. But it does fluently broach the whole question of bibliographical control in the Chinese Buddhist context.

Of course, a handbook giving detailed practical guidance concerning the scholarly use of Chinese Buddhist bibliographies would by contrast have to incorporate a great deal more material, since many of them are far more problematic than we would like to believe. Antonello Palumbo, for example, has indicated in passing in his recent monograph An Early Chinese Commentary on the Ekottarika-āgama (Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing, 2013), pp. 164–8, that the compilation of the Chu sanzang jiji of the early sixth century was a more complex process than has been generally appreciated. Fei Changfang's catalogue, for that matter, seems to have been substantially altered in the course of its transmission, to judge from Dunhuang manuscripts P3739 and P4673. That such matters of detail are not discussed in the work under review does allow for a much smoother read, especially for undergraduates who need to be persuaded that the study of book catalogues is important, but graduates will need to be warned that the information provided is in some respects introductory.

As an introduction, however, the focus on the catalogues does rather obscure one rather important topic of no little interest from a comparative perspective, namely the approximate date of the advent of the concept of canonicity. For to judge from the translations provided from the Chu Sanzang jiji by Arthur Link in “The earliest Chinese account of the compilation of the Tripiṭaka”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 81/2, 1961, pp. 87–103 and 81/3, 1961, pp. 281–99, not much was known in China on this score before the late fourth century, though reliance on his source means that he does not address one passage translated by Bo Fazu 帛法祖 about 300 ce, p. 101, in the reissued pioneering translation of Carlo Puini, Mahaparinirvana sutra (Genova: I Dioscuri, 1990), which speaks not of the Tripiṭaka but of four Āgamas, each copied out on sixty rolls of cloth, at the First Council. Even this conception of a written textual core of Buddhist materials looks unusual, in the light of Stephen Collins, “On the very idea of the Pālic”, Journal of the Pāli Text Society 15, 1990, pp. 89–126, which emphasizes the specificity of the formation of that body of texts over wider Buddhist attitudes. Surely we must take into account not only earlier traditions of Chinese bibliography (and we know that Xun Xu 荀勖 had by 275 catalogued a substantial number of Buddhist texts in the imperial library) but also Chinese conceptions of canonicity, as evidenced for example by the Han carving on stone of the Confucian classics. Since the move from the compilation of booklists to the formation of a canon in the work of Daoan in the late fourth century, with its concomitant signs of editorial interventions in the corpus as a whole – a problem already raised by Tan Shibao but not addressed here – can now be reconsidered in the light of the important new materials found at the Nanatsudera and the Kongōji, one hopes that the appearance of this volume on Buddhist bibliography will stimulate some discussion of these more general issues.