Completed on imperial command in 988 by the scholar-monk Zanning 贊寧 (919-1001), the Biographies of Eminent Monks Compiled during the Song Dynasty (Song gaoseng zhuan 宋高僧傳) contains accounts of over six hundred monks, distributed according to ten categories.  The monks come from the Liu-Song, Northern Wei, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties and early Song period, ranging from the fifth century to the end of the tenth. The bulk of the biographies are from the mid to late Tang dynasty, that is, from roughly the eighth to the tenth century. This includes some of the most famous monks in Chinese Buddhist history, including the pilgrim Yijing 義淨, the Esoteric specialist Amoghavajra, the astronomer and mathematician Yixing 一行, exegetes like Kuiji 窺基, Fazang 法藏, and Zongmi 宗密, and Chan patriarchs including Huineng 慧能, Shenhui 神會 and Mazu 馬祖. But it also contains accounts of less famous and even obscure figures. Aside from the biographies, at times Zanning comments on individual biographies in “addenda” attached to the end of biographies. At the end of each of the ten chapters, he additionally composed a “disquisition,” a lengthy essay on the theme that ties the monks of the chapter together. Taken together, the book is a valuable resource not just for understanding the monks it discusses, but also as a monumental work of medieval historiography.

Chang Po-yung, Marcus Bingenheimer and John Kieschnick have been working for over a decade on a new critical edition of this text. They took as their base text the digital version of the Chinese Buddhist canon (CBETA) since this is the most widely available version of the text.  This text was in turn based on the Taishō edition of the canon published between 1924 and 1934. Most of the texts in the Taishō were based on the 1087 Korean version of the canon, recut in the thirteenth century. But as the Song Biographies were not included in this version, the Taishō editors based their version of the Song Biographies on the version included in the 1589 Jiaxing canon 嘉興藏. When producing our edition, they compared the Taishō edition with various other versions of the Song Biographies, choosing the readings we considered best and explaining our choices in notes. We have in addition identified allusions and explained difficult passages in extensive annotation. The new edition is under contract from the Chinese publisher 天津古籍出版社 . They hope to submit their manuscript by the end of 2026.

In Spring 2025, the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies held a small workshop to discuss problem passages. Project members meet roughly once every three months to work together on the manuscript.

In conjunction with the critical Chinese edition discussed above, John Kieschnick has been working on an annotated English translation of the same work since 1989. The end of this work, which should amount to three or four hefty volumes, is finally in sight. He is preparing to send the first third of the translation to a press for feedback in the coming weeks. His goal is to complete the manuscript by 2029.

For more, see Lekha 2025, p. 8.