Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia

3. TAISHŌ VOLUMES 1821

Rolf W. Giebel

Among the many editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon, the most
readily accessible and most widely used by scholars today is the Taishō
shinshū daizōkyō (New Edition of the Buddhist
Canon Compiled during the Taishō Era), hereafter referred to as the
“Taishō edition.” Published in Japan from 1924 to 1934, it comprises
one hundred volumes, made up of eighty-five volumes of texts contain-
ing 2,920 works, twelve volumes of iconography, and three volumes of
catalogues. The eighty-five volumes of texts (except for vol. 85) have
been arranged by and large in the order of works traditionally consid-
ered to be of Indian provenance, works composed in China, and works
composed in Japan. These have been further classified into thirty-one
categories, of which the tantric texts with which we are here concerned
constitute the tenth (Mikkyōbu , “Section of Esoteric Teach-
ings”), corresponding to vols. 18–21 among the first thirty-two vol-
umes traditionally considered to be of Indian provenance (although a
number of works in vols. 18–21 were in fact composed in China and
some quite probably in Japan). In addition to vols. 18–21, works per-
taining to East Asian esoteric Buddhism include non-canonical com-
mentaries, treatises, ritual manuals, and so on composed in China and
Japan, and these are dealt with in the following section.
The Taishō edition was compiled with the aim of providing a reli-
able and comprehensive edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, but
while the “Section of Esoteric Teachings,” consisting of 573 works (or
618 works if one includes multiple redactions, etc., of some works), is
numerically speaking the largest of the thirty-one categories into which
the Taishō edition is divided, its coverage is not exhaustive and there
are a number of tantric texts found in earlier editions of the Chinese
Buddhist canon that have been omitted. Although perhaps not imme-
diately evident to the reader, the 573 texts contained in vols. 18–21
have been organized into fourteen categories (cf. Miyasaka 1983).