僧祐

僧祐（445年～518年），刘宋元嘉22年至梁天监17年。

江苏江宁人，俗姓俞，南梁佛教高僧。

生平

僧祐幼年时候喜欢佛寺，不肯回家，父母允许其出家。14岁时候，受具足戒后研习律部，后经常开讲戒律，并用所得进行寺院修缮、举行无遮大会、舍身斋等，收集经文。梁武帝非常器重他，所有关于佛教僧侣事宜皆由他审决。天监十七年于建初寺圆寂，享年74岁。他以《十诵律》为宗，又搜集各类经文传记，编写《出三藏记集》、《弘明集》。他门下有智藏、慧廓、宝唱等僧俗达万余人。

Sengyou (Chinese: 僧祐; pinyin: Sēngyòu; 445–518 AD) was a Buddhist monk and early medieval Chinese bibliographer and noted chiefly for being the author of Collected Records Concerning the Tripitaka (出三藏記集 Chu sanzang ji ji, T 2145), which includes a catalogue of Buddhist texts translated into Chinese, and the Collection on the Propagation and Clarification of Buddhism (弘明集 Hong Ming Ji, T 2102)

Sengyou's ancestral home was Xiapi in Pengcheng Commandery (northwest of modern Suining, Jiangsu). However, his father moved to Jiankang (建康), where he was born. His secular name was Yu. As a young boy he practiced devotions at Jianchu Monastery. At 14, rather than acquiesce to an arranged marriage, he took novice vows and entered Dinglin Monastery, Zhongshan in Jiankang. He was ordained as a bhikkhu aged 20 and received instruction in Vinaya by Faying (d.480). He became renown as a master of the Vinaya.

Collected Records Concerning the Tripitaka

Although there were earlier works of bibliography with respect to Buddhist texts at the time, Sengyou's Collected Records Concerning the Tripitaka (Chu sanzang ji ji) introduced important innovations in how the texts were arranged, including a hierarchy of authenticity. Not only were Buddhist texts continually trickling in along the Silk Road, but the Chinese had begun to pass off local productions as authentic Indian sutras. Sengyou proposed criteria for assessing the authenticity of Buddhist sutras at a time when many fake or apocryphal texts were in circulation. He was particularly focussed on the translator of a text, and this made him suspicious of unattributed texts. As Tanya Storch says, "Absence of information about the translator was a signal that it might be a compilation by a Chinese person who did not understand Sanskrit and had never studied Buddhism in the west [i.e. India].

The Chu sanzang ji ji is presented in five sections

A discussion on the provenance of translated scriptures,

A record of (new) titles and their listings in earlier catalogues,

Prefaces to scriptures,

Miscellaneous treatises on specific doctrines, and

Biographies of translators.

"By subjecting Buddhist scriptures to the textual criticism similar to that applied to the Confucian classics, Sengyou managed to elevate the literary and social status of the Tripiṭaka.” At the Liang court, Sengyou's work was overshadowed by the catalogue of Baochang (寶唱) who produced his catalogue in 521 CE. However, it is Sengyou's catalogue that survives.

Sengyou was assisted in his literary work by his student, Liu Xie, who went on to write Wenxin Diaolong, an important work on literary aesthetics.