in China, Korea, and Japan. Pasting printed pages
onto scrolls gave way to the folded book in the ninth
or tenth century. Stitched books, bound with such
materials as bamboo and horsehair, were introduced
in the tenth or eleventh century and are still used for
some Buddhist writings.
The impetus for carving the entire Buddhist CANON
on woodblocks may be traced to an imperially sanc-
tioned xylographic edition of Confucian classics made
between 932 and 953 under the auspices of the Later
Shu state in Sichuan. During the early Song period, an
official edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon was
carved on woodblocks between 972 and 983 in
Chengdu—5,048 volumes in 130,000 blocks. A dy-
nastically sponsored printing revolution followed in
Asia for the next several hundred years. The Khitans,
Jurchens, Tanguts, and Koreans all carved and printed
Buddhist canons either in Chinese characters or in na-
tive scripts.
Lithography
Long before the development of xylography, exact
copies of important literature and beautiful calligra-
phy were produced by making rubbings from stone in-
scriptions. The Confucian classics were carved in stone
in 175 C.E. The first stone carvings of Buddhist scrip-
tures were made during the Northern Qi period
(550–577) around the capital at Ye. A grand project of
preserving the Buddhist scriptures was begun during
the end of the Sui period (581–618) at Yunju
Monastery on Fangshan in northern China southwest
of present-day Beijing. In dread of the impending DE-
CLINE OF THE DHARMA(mofa) and the corruption and
loss of the Buddhist religion, the monk Jingwan (d.
639) vowed to carve the entire canon of Buddhist scrip-
tures onto stone as a means of preserving them for all
time. The stone tablets were stored in mountain caves
and underground caches near the monastery at Shijing
shan (Stone Scripture Mountain). The project contin-
ued through the Tang (618–907), Liao (907–1125), and
Jin (1125–1234) dynasties due to both imperial and lo-
cal support. More than four thousand stone tablets
from nine caves and ten thousand buried tablets of the
Fangshan lithic canon have been identified.
Movable type
Although movable type was invented in China, Korean
artisans perfected the techniques associated with this
method of printing. In China, movable earthenware
type was made in the mid-eleventh century; later, type
made of tin was cast, but it is not known whether these
were used by Buddhists. Movable wooden type was in-
vented by the beginning of the fourteenth century (at
the latest), but examples of printing by this process are
difficult to differentiate from xylography. Pieces of a
wooden Uigur-script font were found at Dunhuang
and dated to about 1300.
The type mold was invented in either China or Ko-
rea, probably during the early thirteenth century prior
to the Mongolian invasions. The earliest reference to
printing with movable metal type is found in the
colophon to a woodblock print of the Korean Nam-
myo ̆ng Ch’o ̆n hwasang song chu ̆ngdo-ga sasil(Buddhist
Master Nammyo ̆ng Ch’o ̆n’s Laudatory Commentary on
the “Song Verifying Enlightenment”). The colophon
says that the text was originally printed with cast metal
type in Korea in 1234. The oldest extant example of
metal type printing is the Pulcho chikchi simch’e yojo ̆l
(Essentials in which the Buddhas and the Patriarchs
Point to the Essence of the Mind), which was printed
in 1377 at Hu ̆ngdo ̆k Monastery in Ch’o ̆ngju in cen-
tral Korea. The type was made using the lost-wax type-
casting method, which seems to have been the earliest
process for making movable metal type. One draw-
back to this method is that each piece of type has a
slightly different shape, so the printed result lacks aes-
thetic balance.
During the late fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-
turies, a more advanced method of casting metal type
using wooden models, called mother type(moja), was
developed by the Choso ̆n government of Korea. The
precision of the wooden mother types was such that
the shapes of all the pieces were alike. The technology
of movable metal type was transmitted from Korea
back to China and later to Japan. The first book printed
with movable type in Japan was made in 1595. After
the creation and promulgation of the Korean alphabet
in 1446, some of the earliest books published with
movable metal type in the Korean vernacular were
episodes of the Buddha’s life and hymns honoring
S ́akyamuni written and printed in 1447 and 1448. Dur-
ing the ensuing centuries in Korea, metal type editions
of Buddhist scriptures and illustrated vernacular ex-
positions of Buddhist scriptures were produced, the
most common being the LOTUSSUTRA(SADDHARMA-
PUNDARIKA-SUTRA), the Diamond Sutra,and the Fumu
enzhong jing(Sutra on the Profound Kindness of Par-
ents; Korean, Pumo u ̆njung kyo ̆ng). These same scrip-
tures, as well as the Shiwang jing(Sutra of the Ten
Kings), were also printed widely in contemporary
China and Japan, usually from woodblocks, with a few
printed from movable type.PRINTINGTECHNOLOGIES