Song Woodblock Printing Tradition of Buddhist Scriptures

Timeline

1. c. 971–1100Kaibao Temple, Chengdu · SichuanThe Northern Song organized woodblock printing of the Buddhist canon through state and temple forces, establishing formats for layout, lineation, phonetic glosses, and colophons; temples and bookshops across the regions imitated them to print individual sutras and treatises, forming a sustainable scripture-printing industry chain.
2. c. 1190–1200Jingshan and surrounding printing workshops in Hangzhou · ZhejiangAfter the Southern Song settled in Jiangnan, Hangzhou, Mingzhou, Fuzhou, and other places continued printing the Buddhist canon and individual sutras; in the 1190s, merit-based temple printing, donor colophons, and circulated editions coexisted, and the woodblock accordion-fold format became the everyday form for veneration, recitation, and canon storage.
3. c. 1200–1279Jiangnan printing centers · JiangnanPrinting activity remained vigorous in the late Song; its formats and distribution networks were inherited by later Yuan projects such as the Puning Canon in Hangzhou; the collation standards and material forms of Song-edition Buddhist scriptures profoundly influenced canon printing in Korea and Japan.