Nanjio considers that of the 2213 works contained in the first collection only 276 are extant.  Although the catalogues are preserved, all the earlier collections are lost:  copies of the eighth and ninth were preserved in the Zo-jo-ji Library of Tokyo[750] and Chinese and Japanese editions of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth are current.  So far as one can judge, when the eighth catalogue, or K’ai-yuan-lu, was composed (between 713 and 741), the older and major part of the Canon had been definitively fixed and the later collections merely add the translations made by Amogha, and by writers of the Sung and Yuan dynasties.

The editions of the Chinese Tripitaka must be distinguished from the collections, for by editions are meant the forms in which each collection was published, the text being or purporting to be the same in all the editions of each collection.  It is said[751] that under the Sung and Yuan twenty different editions were produced.  These earlier issues were printed on long folding sheets and a nun called Fa-chen[752] is said to have first published an edition in the shape of ordinary Chinese books.  In 1586 a monk named Mi-Tsang[753] imitated this procedure and his edition was widely used.  About a century later a Japanese priest known as Tetsu-yen[754] reproduced it and his publication, which is not uncommon in Japan, is usually called the O-baku edition.  There are two modern Japanese editions:  (a) that of Tokyo, begun in 1880, based on a Korean edition[755] with various readings taken from other Chinese editions. (b) That of Kyoto, 1905, which is a reprint of the Ming collection.[756] A Chinese edition has been published at Shanghai (1913) at the expense of Mrs. Hardoon, a Chinese lady well known as a munificent patron of the faith, and I believe another at Nanking, but I do not know if it is complete or not.[757]

3

The translations contained in the Chinese Tripitaka belong to several periods.[758] In the earliest, which extends to the middle of the fourth century, the works produced were chiefly renderings of detached sutras.[759] Few treatises classified as Vinaya or Abhidharma were translated and those few are mostly extracts or compilations.  The sutras belong to both the Hina and Mahayana.  The earliest extant translation or rather compilation, the Sutra of Forty-two sections, belongs to the former school, and so do the majority of the translations made by An-Shih-Kao (148-170 A.D.), but from the second century onwards the Prajnaparamita and Amitabha Sutras make their appearance.[760] Many of the translations made in this period are described as incomplete or incorrect and the fact that most of them were superseded or supplemented by later versions shows that the Chinese recognized their provisional character.  Future research will probably show that many of them are paraphrases or compendiums rather than translations in our sense.