A flowering of words: the development of early Chinese Buddhist exegetical literature from the 2nd to the 4th centuries CE

Prof. Stefano Zacchetti (Oxford)

Commentaries are a potentially rich and still surprisingly underused source of information on the intellectual history of early Chinese Buddhism. This lecture intends to provide an overview of the surviving exegetical texts composed in China between the second and the 4th centuries CE, discussing the circumstances of their transmission, and trying to assess their cultural significance. Apart from the few commentaries of this period preserved in the canon, the discussion will also take into account those surviving in (generally fragmentary) manuscripts, or partially known to us by indirect tradition, thanks to quotations in other works.