The next period, roughly speaking 375-745 A.D., was extraordinarily prolific in extensive and authoritative translations.  The translators now attack not detached chapters or discourses but the great monuments of Indian Buddhist literature.  Though it is not easy to make any chronological bisection in this period, there is a clear difference in the work done at the beginning and at the end of it.  From the end of the fourth century onwards a desire to have complete translations of the great canonical works is apparent.  Between 385 and 445 A.D. were translated the four Agamas, analogous to the Nikayas of the Pali Canon, three great collections of the Vinaya, and the principal scriptures of the Abhidharma according to the Sarvastivadin school.  For the Mahayana were translated the great sutras known as Avatamsaka, Lankavatara, and many others, as well as works ascribed to Asvaghosha and Nagarjuna.  After 645 A.D. a further development of the critical spirit is perceptible, especially in the labours of Hsuan Chuang and I-Ching.  They attempt to give the religious public not only complete works in place of extracts and compendiums, but also to select the most authoritative texts among the many current in India.  Thus, though many translations had appeared under the name of Prajnaparamita, Hsuan Chuang filled 600 fasciculi with a new rendering of the gigantic treatise.  I-Ching supplemented the already bulky library of Vinaya works with versions of the Mulasarvastivadin recension and many auxiliary texts.

Amogha (Pu-K’ung) whose literary labours extended from 746 to 774 A.D. is a convenient figure to mark the beginning of the next and last period, although some of its characteristics appear a little earlier.  They are that no more translations are made from the great Buddhist classics—­partly no doubt because they had all been translated already, well or ill—­but that renderings of works described as Dharani or Tantra pullulate and multiply.  Though this literature deserves such epithets as decadent and superstitious, yet it would appear that Indian Tantras of the worst class were not palatable to the Chinese.

4

The Chinese Tripitaka is of great importance for the literary history of Buddhism, but the material which it offers for investigation is superabundant and the work yet done is small.  We are confronted by such questions as, can we accept the dates assigned to the translators, can we assume that, if the Chinese translations or transliterations correspond with Indian titles, the works are the same, and if the works are professedly the same, can we assume that the Chinese text is a correct presentment of the Indian original?