The Administration of Buddhism in China: A Study and Translation ...

also a staunch supporter of the ideal of “perfect impartiality” and an ardent critic of official meddling in the writing of history,⁸¹ a view at odds with the “hands on” approach of imperially commissioned historical compilations in the early Song.

In addition, Zanning was critical of two presumably Buddhist oriented works, the Discourse on the Sound of Waves and the Record of Elucidation, the authorship of which is unknown.⁸² Regarding Zanning’s contributions to Buddhism, in addition to his surviving works, The Biographies of Eminent Monks compiled in the Song dynasty and the Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy, he also compiled Records of the Sages and Worthies of Vulture Peak and Guidelines to the Pronunciation and Meaning of the Commentary on the Ritual Practices in the Fourfold Vinaya, a seminal vinaya work by Daoxuan (596-667). Zanning’s connection to Daoxuan also extends to the later’s compilation of a major work in the gaoseng zhuan genre, the Xu Gaoseng zhuan. Finally, as noted by Makita, the two works listed in Zanning’s oeuvre, Anthology of Buddhist Sources and the Anthology of Non-Buddhist Sources, were not independent works, but likely compilations that included Zanning’s works on Buddhism (neixue 內學) and non-Buddhism (waixue 外學), respectively.

The titles of the works attributed to Zanning provide meager information on his critical approach to Chinese historical and Confucian sources, but they do indicate that Zanning had explicit and highly evolved views on Chinese historiography and the interpretation of literary sources. They reveal Zanning as a literatus actively participating in the highly charged debate over the true nature of wen in the early Song. Without access to the contents contained in these works and the ideas expressed therein, our view of Zanning will always be restricted, and any attempt to assess Zanning will only partially account for the full breadth of views he held. This makes an evaluation of the contents of the Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy, a historiographical work that reveals Zanning’s views not only on Buddhism, but on the nature of wen and what may be properly included in it, the criteria for evaluating historical