Two of the Largest Religious Canons Ever Assembled

Two branches of this family produced canons on a scale few traditions have matched. Classical Chinese carries the Confucian classics, the Daoist canon known as the Daozang, and the Chinese Buddhist Tripitaka, the last of which preserves translations of Indian works whose Sanskrit originals are lost. Classical Tibetan carries the Kangyur, the translated word of the Buddha, and the Tengyur, the translated commentaries, together running to more than three hundred volumes. Both were the product of deliberate state and monastic programmes: translation into Chinese ran for the better part of a millennium under successive dynasties, and the Tibetan effort involved the creation of a standardised technical vocabulary by imperial decree so that Sanskrit Buddhist terms would be rendered consistently across every workshop.

The consequence for anyone studying Buddhism is that the two largest surviving bodies of Buddhist literature are in two languages of a single family, neither of them the language any of it was composed in. The consequence for the family itself is that two of its members have written records deep enough to anchor the reconstruction of everything else, which is why the sparsely documented languages of the Himalayan foothills matter so much to specialists: they are where the undisturbed evidence is.