Pictured (l to r): CIIS President Joseph Subbiondo, Yi Wu, PhD (Professor, Asian and Comparative Studies), Jeremy Caifang Zhu (Student, East-West Psychology), Steven Goodman, PhD (Codirector and Professor, Asian and Comparative Studies),Lise M. Dyckman (Library Director)

The Bailin Chan Monastery, a leading monastery in China, generously donated the 100-volume Chinese Canon of Buddhism to CIIS. With more than 2,200 canonical texts from various denominations, the Chinese Canon of Buddhism is the largest of the three major Buddhist canons, the other two being the Pali Canon and Tibetan Canon.

The monastery donated a new print edition of the Canon (in Chinese), first published in Japan in the 1920s. It also graciously covered all shipment costs of the volumes to San Francisco.

These volumes now reside in the Special Collections section of CIIS's Laurance S. Rockefeller Library, at 1453 Mission Street. CIIS is now one of the only seven libraries in the state of California to have a complete set of these works.

“Our warmest thanks to the Bailin Chan Monastery for this most generous donation,” said CIIS President Joseph Subbiondo. “It is a privilege and honor for CIIS to add this important Buddhist canon to CIIS’s library, a collection of texts that will contribute significantly to the scholarship of students and faculty.”

President Subbiondo extended special thanks to Reverend Minghai, the abbot of the Bailin Chan Monastery, and Reverend Jinghui, the former and founding abbot of the monastery, who were instrumental in making this donation possible. Rev. Jinghui is the master (guru) of Rev. Minghai and has been the vice chairman of the Chinese Buddhist Association for about a decade and is the editor-in-chief of the Voice of Dharma and Journal of CHAN in China.

President Subbiondo also thanked Jeremy Zhu, a graduate student in CIIS’s Asian and Comparative Studies program and a past student at the monastery, for facilitating the receipt of this gift.