THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRACTICES OF SCRIPTURAL ECONOMY: COMPILING AND COPYING A SEVENTH-CENTURY CHINESE BUDDHIST ANTHOLOGY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY ALEXANDER ONG HSU CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 © Copyright by Alexander Ong Hsu, 2018. All rights reserved. Dissertation Abstract: Practices of Scriptural Economy: Compiling and Copying a Seventh-Century Chinese Buddhist Anthology By Alexander Ong Hsu This dissertation reads a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist anthology to examine how medieval Chinese Buddhists practiced reducing and reorganizing their voluminous scriptural tra- dition into more useful formats. The anthology, A Grove of Pearls from the Garden of Dharma (Fayuan zhulin ), was compiled by a scholar-monk named Daoshi (?–683) from hundreds of Buddhist scriptures and other religious writings, listing thousands of quotations un- der a system of one-hundred category-chapters. This dissertation shows how A Grove of Pearls was designed by and for scriptural economy: it facilitated and was facilitated by traditions of categorizing, excerpting, and collecting units of scripture. Anthologies like A Grove of Pearls selectively copied the forms and contents of earlier Buddhist anthologies, catalogs, and other compilations; and, in turn, later Buddhists would selectively copy from it in order to spread the Buddhist dharma. I read anthologies not merely to describe their contents but to show what their compilers and copyists thought they were doing when they made and used them. A Grove of Pearls from the Garden of Dharma has often been read as an example of a Buddhist leishu , or “Chinese encyclopedia.” But the work’s precursors from the sixth cen- tury do not all fit neatly into this genre because they do not all use lei or categories consist- ently, nor do they all have encyclopedic breadth like A Grove of Pearls. The medieval tradition of Chinese Buddhist anthology was ultimately concerned about “collecting extracts” (chaoji ), and “categories” allowed for storing and recalling the extracts. I describe how lei function in iii A Grove of Pearls and other anthologies, situating A Grove of Pearls in a longer history of Chi- nese Buddhist anthology and compilation. I translate and analyze the prefaces of A Grove of Pearls and other anthologies to illustrate how they articulate scriptural economy as a problem to be solved. Practices of scriptural “extraction” (chao ) and “collection” (ji ) for the spread of the Dharma were not only featured as necessary for Buddhist practice within the scriptures, but Chinese Buddhists imagined themselves as following these traditions when they cataloged scrip- tures, wrote commentary on them, and built anthologies from them. I catalog excerpts from A Grove of Pearls that thematize “extracting” and “collecting” dharma respectively to suggest how anthologies thought they should be used. Finally, I analyze medieval manuscripts from the Dunhuang cache that extract excerpts from A Grove of Pearls to show how the practice of re- ducing anthology for quotidian use can be read as continuous with the practice of building an- thologies in the first place; and I look at how Daoshi’s colleague Daoxuan (596–667) re- duced large catalogs for building scriptural canons that could be used in practice, for scholarly consultation and ritual recitation. My research shows how medieval Chinese Buddhist anthologies justified themselves by iv employing rhetoric from long-standing Buddhist narratives on the size and difficulty of the Dharma as well as the brilliance and discretion of its exponents. By illustrating how anthologies articulate a need for scriptural economy and then put it into practice by placing quotes from old scriptures under new categories, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how an- thologies participated in a broader culture of textual curation, making the Dharma more available and ready-to-hand in medieval China. iv Acknowledgements: I am grateful to everyone who has supported me in my research. My parents, Maria and Hsiao-Shu Hsu, made all this possible for me, and I need to thank them first. Paul Copp, my main advisor, introduced me to A Grove of Pearls from the Garden of Dharma almost over a decade ago. I’ve relied heavily on his mentorship. At every stage along the way he pushed me to think harder and told me to “read more Chinese.” I am grateful for his sense and style. Christian Wedemeyer, my other main advisor, introduced me to the concept of “skillful means” a little bit longer ago. He has taught me how to make the most of my limited capacities as a mere alpasattva, encouraging me to stay with the big picture. Wendy Doniger and Tony Yu taught me I could study Asian religions for a living, and they’ve helped me in many invaluable ways over the years, offering me stories, books, seminars, and jobs to sustain me. Bruce Lincoln, Matthew Kapstein, and Steve Collins taught me many other things in the History of Religions. They all gave me questions that were too difficult for me to answer, but they also showed me it was theoretically possible. My instructors, my cohort, and my classmates at Chicago Divinity: thank you collectively for making Swift Hall the place to be. Donald Harper encouraged me to read texts as texts, that is to say, in their social, cultural, and material contexts. He introduced me to Chen Ming at Peking University, where I spent my Fulbright year in 2013–2014. Professor Chen and his students Wu Weilin and Zhao Jinchao made homes for me at Beida as well as in A Grove of Pearls and its many copies. Thank you for teaching me. Thanks as well to the University of Chicago Center in Beijing for offering study space, kind friends, and coffee. For answering my e-mails promptly, offering encouragement, and sharpening my mind I thank my friends and colleagues: Zaid Adhami, Katherine Alexander, Tim Barrett, Marcus Bingenheimer, Pablo Blitstein, Alia Breitwieser, Joy Brennan, Adam Bronson, Mandy Burton, Rob Campany, Lucas Carmichael, Ling Chan, Lucille Chia, Tamara Chin, Kristel Clayville, Brian Cooper, Abby Coplin, Emily Crews, Austin Dean, Drew Durdin, Anne Feng, Richard Fox, Amanda Goodman, Eleanor Goodman, Allison Gray, Ethan Harkness, Justin Henry, Coleman Hillstrom, Sam Hopkins, Eric Huntington, Chris Jensen, Jason Josephson-Storm, Sonam Kachru, Tom Kelly, Jeffrey Kotyk, David Lebovitz, Alan Levinovitz, Andy Liu, Bryan Lowe, Nabanjan Maitra, Tom Mazanec, Richard McBride, Bill McGrath, Kelly Meister, Anne Mocko, Tom v Newhall, Janine Nicol, Evan Nicoll-Johnson, Chris Nugent, Lauren Osborne, Jonathan Pettit, Lucy Pick, Chaz Preston, Michael Radich, Frank Reynolds, Jim Robinson, Alex Rocklin, Rick Rosengarten, Pierce Salguero, Rebecca Scharbach, Koichi Shinohara, H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing, Jeff Stackert, Tanya Storch, Buzzy Teiser, Jeff Tharsen, Nicholas Witkowski, Paul Vierthaler, Jiang Wu, Saadia Yacoob, Zhaohua Yang, Tyson Yost, Stuart Young, Kenny Yu, Boqun Zhou, and Brook Ziporyn. My work was supported by fellowships and grants from the University of Chicago Brauer Seminar, Fulbright IIE, the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Alma Wilson Teaching Fellowship for Religious Studies at the University of Chicago, and the ACLS Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. My research took shape while using various digital resources designed to make life easier for Buddhologists and Sinologists. I have cited a few in the dissertation, but I have used many more. I want to thank the communities and institutions that maintain these websites: Marcus v Bingenheimer’s “Bibliography of Translations from the Chinese Buddhist Canon into Western Languages” (mbingenheimer.net/tools/bibls/transbibl.html), the Chinese Buddhist Eleectronic Text Association (cbeta.org), Donald Sturgeon’s “Chinese Text Project” (ctext.org), Dharma Drum Buddhist College’s “Visualizing and Querying Chinese Buddhist Bibliographies” (bud- dhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/biographies/gis), Charles Muller’s “Digital Database of Buddhism” (www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/), Academica Sinica’s “Scripta Sinica Full-Text Chinese Records Database” (hanchi.ihp.sinica.edu.tw), the International Dunhuang Project (idp.bl.uk), Jim Breen’s “WWWJDIC: Online Japanese Dictionary” (nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C), the Research Institute of Tripitaka Koreana’s “Tripitaka Koreana Knowledgebase System” (kb.sutra.re.kr), Tokyo University’s “SAT Daizōkyō Text Database” (21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/SAT/index_en.html), SuttaCentral’s “Early Buddhist texts, translations, and parallels” (suttacentral.net), Michael Radich and Jamie Norrish’s TACL computer tools for n-gram analysis of digitized Chinese texts (github.com/ajenhl/tacl), and Handian (zdic.net). I owe a debt of gratitude to North Dakota State University over the past couple years for a teaching position and a warm community of scholars, especially the Departments of English; Anthropology; and History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. Thank you for getting me to the finish line. I want to single out Jason Protass for reading early drafts of these chapters, James Benn for reading middle-period drafts, and Daniel Morgan for reading and even copy-editing a late-period draft of the dissertation. Thank you for having enough faith in this project to read your way through it and help me say a little better what I was trying to say. My brother Adam Hsu and his family, Danielle Zheng, Addie and Teddy, thank you for your perspective and good humor. Greg and Kathy Kowalski,