Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/101

Rh the T'u-shu-tsi-ch'öng in more than 5000 volumes. It is the most bulky printed book in the world and, when set up, fills the walls of a well-sized room. It was printed with movable copper type and published in 1731, only a hundred copies being struck off at the time. Columbia University owns a copy of this remarkable work, a reprint in the size of the original, of which 250 copies were made a few years ago at the expense of the old Tsung-li-yamen. The "Treasury of Philosophers" closes with the two very important and voluminous divisions "Buddhism" and "Tauism." Thousands of works are devoted to that religion which came from India and which has taken possession of the masses probably more than any other teaching. The greater part of these Buddhist books consists of translations from the Sanskrit. These translations were prepared between the first and ninth centuries, partly by Chinese devotees who traveled to India and returned to China laden with formerly unknown sacred books, and partly by Indians who had studied Chinese in China. Through these translations thousands of religious technical terms have been introduced into the Chinese language from some Indian prototype, and all Chinese Buddhist texts bristle with Sanskrit words transcribed in Chinese characters. In the Buddhist divine service these foreign words are not understood by the masses; but the priests study them carefully with the assistance of glossaries; Sanskrit is thus to Chinese Buddhists what Latin is to the Roman Catholics, a sealed book to the masses and an object of study to the clergy. The Imperial Catalogue ignores this class of Literature as a foreign element; but Buddhist works of purely Chinese origin are duly recorded. Among these the Fa-yüan-chu-lin, a work of the seventh century in 100 sections, explaining the Buddhist philosophy to Chinese readers, and a series of learned works containing the biographies of over a thousand celebrated Buddhist saints and priests under the title Kau-söng-chuan deserve to be mentioned.