Abstract:
Buddhist history established in the Han Dynasty is a distinct area of advanced Chinese history, which was gradually shaped with the spread in the territory of the Han Dynasty. Although Buddhist historians didn’t appear till times of the Wei Kingdom and the Jing and Northern and Southern Dynasties, Buddhist scholars of clear and self-conscious sense of history kept large quantities of materials of Buddhist history by collecting biographies of Buddhas and related Indian Buddhist history and history of Buddhism spread in China, and writing the forewords for their translated Buddhist classics. Some scholars indexed the contents of translated Buddhist classics and personally investigated the related historical materials of the founded Buddhist temples. Some monks travelled to the western regions and India to study Buddhism, contributing significant impressions and travel accounts by personally investigating Indian Buddhism, which greatly extended the vision of Buddhist history. With all this done, Buddhist historians in the Han Dynasty, who were equipped with more self-conscious sense of history and more mature historical accomplishment, collected materials, establishing stylistic rules and layout and compiled a great number of historical classics, helping establish the scholarship of Buddhist history and win a place for the scholarship in the world of advanced Chinese history.
