Wǔdēng quánshū 五燈全書
Complete Book of the Five Lamps
compiled by 超永 (Chāoyǒng), completed 1697 (Qīng Kāngxī 康熙 36)
About the work
The largest of all Chán lamp records, in 120 juan, compiling the entire genealogy from the seven buddhas of the past through the early Qīng. Compiled by Báoshān Chāoyǒng 寶山超永 of the Línjì line under imperial patronage in the Kāngxī era. The “Complete Book of the Five Lamps” effectively closes the lamp-record tradition: no later work attempted to supersede it.
Abstract
Chāoyǒng synthesised the Wǔdēng huìyuán (KR6q0012), the Wǔdēng yántǒng (KR6q0019), and the various individual continuations (the Xù chuándēng lù, Zēngjí xù chuándēng lù, etc.) into a single 120-juan canonical compendium covering all known Chán lineage figures from antiquity through the Kāngxī era. Imperial patronage gave the project both the financial scale and the institutional authority to make the Quánshū the de facto standard reference for late-imperial Chán lineage information.
The work largely sidestepped the seventeenth-century Yántǒng controversies by adopting the lineage attributions of the older Wǔdēng huìyuán in the Sòng-era sections — a quiet repudiation of Tōngróng’s reattributions. For the Yuán-Míng-Qīng coverage Chāoyǒng worked from monastic local-history materials and contemporary recorded-sayings literature.
The work was printed in the Jiāxīng 嘉興 canon and entered the Xuzangjing through that channel; it was reprinted multiple times in the Qīng and remains the standard late-imperial Chán-lineage reference work.
Translations and research
No English translation. Treated in surveys of Qīng Chán historiography (Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute, OUP 2008; Liào Zhàohēng’s work on Míng-Qīng Buddhism). The principal Sinophone treatment is in Yáng Zēngwén 楊曾文’s Sòng-Yuán Chánzōng shǐ 宋元禪宗史 (中國社會科學, 2006) and Dù Jìwén 杜繼文’s surveys.
Other points of interest
The 120-juan scale closes the Chán lamp-record tradition: subsequent Qīng-era lineage records are typically school- or monastery-specific, not encyclopaedic.