大宋僧史略 2.49

2.49

Those who have attained the fruits [of the path] are without limit or boundary; how could gentlemen who have left household life be subject to government control? Yet having entered an era of refined culture, the responsibility for discipline and supervision had to be established. Among them were those who, seeing its leisure, vied to enter, or who fled thither out of dread of corvée labor. Thus they illicitly assumed the name [of monk], yet in truth were not noble gentlemen. How could the inner vinaya of the saṃgha control such unbridled cattle and wandering horses? Therefore, monastic bureaus were instituted to coordinate them, and nominal registers were established to record them. In the times of the Zhou and Sui dynasties, this cannot be known. Only from the Tang onward did directors begin to be heard of and registered attachments made. In the first month of the fourth year of the Dahe reign of Emperor Wenzong, the Bureau of Sacrifices requested that monks and nuns throughout the realm who had assumed the name without regular ordination should submit their names to the Department [of State Affairs], each to be issued a departmental certificate to serve as proof for entering the registers; at that time, those who submitted their names numbered some seven hundred thousand. The compilation of registers and entry into the census began in the fifth year of Dahe. If so, were there no registers before this? How did the Bureau for the Oversight of Blessings, the Zhaoxuan Temple, and the Office for the Veneration of the Mystery oversee and judge monastic affairs? The answer is: the auditing and compilation of monastic registers took different forms. In some cases, there was general supervision monastery by monastery; in some, separate recording following each prefecture; in some, individual names were counted in turn; and in some, certificates were surrendered and replacements added; thus they were not uniform. However, this arose from the likes and dislikes of the ruler of the time, and was the relaxation and tightening of registration. Now, our Great Song follows the regulations of the Xiande reign of the Zhou, compiling them once every three years and fixing them in the statutory ordinances.