Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist Canons in Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese functioned as East Asia's primary scholarly and religious lingua franca for centuries, read and written not only across China but by educated elites in Korea, Japan and Vietnam, who could communicate in writing across mutually unintelligible spoken languages through shared literacy in Classical Chinese texts, a situation comparable to Latin's role connecting educated readers across medieval Europe's many vernaculars.

James Legge's nineteenth-century English translations of the Confucian Classics, still influential in Western sinology today, made this vast body of Classical Chinese religious and philosophical literature accessible outside China for the first time at scale, and Neo-Confucianism, a major philosophical and religious synthesis developed by scholars including Zhu Xi in the Song dynasty, produced its own substantial body of Classical Chinese commentary reinterpreting the ancient Confucian classics for a later era while incorporating Buddhist and Taoist metaphysical concepts. Classical Chinese Buddhist translation, undertaken over centuries by figures including Kumarajiva and Xuanzang, rendered enormous Sanskrit Buddhist textual corpora into a Classical Chinese idiom that itself shaped the vocabulary and conceptual framework of East Asian Buddhism as it developed distinct from its Indian origins.