This article analyses catalogues of the Chinese translations of Buddhist scriptures. The main goal for compiling these scriptural catalogues was to prove authenticity of the Chinese Buddhist canon. The influence of Confucian bibliographic tradition that developed long before Buddhism spread to China was one of the main reasons why Chinese Buddhists decided to preserve the orally-transmitted Buddha-word in a form of a critically evaluated bibliographic collection of written texts. In both Confucian and Buddhist catalogues, criteria of authenticity were found in the knowledge about the transmitter of the text. While Confucians proclaimed that only those versions of the classics that can be traced back to Confucius were authentic, Chinese Buddhists scholars declared that only those scriptures that came from known translators were true words of the Buddha. This approach appears to be typologically similar to that used by Christian scholars who attributed most important books to the apostles. This is why I conclude my analysis of the Chinese Buddhist catalogues by discussing certain parallel developments in the history of the Chinese Buddhist and Christian canons.
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