For more than a hundred years Chinese Buddhist scriptural catalogues are now used by Buddhologists and Sinologists to reconstruct the history of ancient Buddhist canon in India and various ways in which it was spread in Central Asia and China. But how reliable is the data contained in these catalogues? Such a question has never been posed by scholars. To answer it requires understanding why catalogues of Chinese Buddhist translations were compiled and why the historical data was included in them.

Most careful close-reading analysis of more than thirty catalogues shows that the information about an author of the translation and a date when the translation was made according to Chinese chronology served as a criterion of authenticity for the Buddhist canon in Chinese. Application of this criterion to a living translation process resulted in that many anonymous translations were ascribed to certain authors just in order to prove the authenticity of those texts. This can only mean that historical information found in Chinese Buddhist scriptural catalogues is by no means accurate and, therefore, reliable.