Source: Naitō 1967a

Naitō considers the place of Dao'an's catalogue in the history of traditional Chinese bibliography, particularly in relation to the development of classification schema. He argues that Dao'an compiled his catalogue as part of a broader attempt to recover bibliographic resources from losses resulting from political chaos. Because this was a "private" catalogue, restricted to one particular class of books, rather than an official or court project, it enjoyed greater freedom to experiment. Dao'an's concern with the authentification of texts, and his historicist attention to the circumstances under which they were produced, are both innovations against the backdrop of the bibliographic tradition prior to him, and clear results of these circumstances.

As Ōchō E'nichi had already observed, Dao'an did not use classification schemas that were later to become standard, such as the "tripiṭaka" 三藏 division (sūtra, śāstra, vinaya), nor the "two vehicles" (Mahāyāna, "hīnayāna"), probably because during his years in Xiangyang, when the catalogue was composed, he had still not attained the necessary overview of canonical materials. His schema, then, was based rather on the characteristics of the translations themselves, rather than the underlying source texts: particularly the circumstances of their production in Chinese, namely, the person(s), time and place associated with the translation. This mode of classification evinces a new type of historicisation of bibliography. Another dimension of this schema was that it required a category of anonymous texts, i.e. texts for which the identity of the translator was not known. These anonymous texts Dao'an further divided into broad periods (ancient, and more recent), and according to the broad geographic region in which they were produced. The place of these developments in Chinese bibliographic history was also remarked upon by Liang Qichao. Dao'an's framework was to have a far-reaching influence, and eventually led, via the (Liu) Song cataloguer Wang Jian 王儉 and CSZJJ, to the annalistic approach of Fei Zhangfang in LDSBJ.

The "tripiṭaka" 三藏 division (經論律, sūtra, śāstra, vinaya) was introduced by Sengyou (in CSZJJ). This makes it difficult to discern the extent to which his work preserves the form of Dao'an's earlier work, upon which he built. In addition, Sengyou's format of listing all works of a single translator and then discussing them all in a single 解題 (總結文) was probably not inherited from Dao'an, according to Naitō, but rather, was probably Sengyou's innovation. One type of detail that allows us to draw this inference is that these summary notes sometimes mention Dao'an by name in reporting his judgments (安公云...), which would not be usual if the wording was Dao'an's own.

Naitō believes that Dao'an's catalogue was, rather, most probably organised by titles annotated one by one with such information about title, length, date, translator, and any other supplemental notes as Dao'an had to hand. This format had been common practice from the Han, which means Dao'an would just have been following precedent. It is possible that the titles were indeed grouped by translator, where the translator was known, but it is unlikely that there were any summary comments of the sort seen in CSZJJ. Co-translations, Naitō believes, were probably listed only once, rather than duplicated in separate lists for each of the translators, as later became the norm. Naitō argues that when attributions for co-translations were later reduplicated for inclusion in separate lists for each of the co-translators, it sometimes had the effect of creating ghost texts and even ghost translators, as in the instance where 竺法護 and 曇摩羅察 --- both, in his view, referring to Dharmarakṣa --- were treated as separate individuals [see CSZJJ notice for the 須真天子 T588, T2145 (LV) 9c9-11]. He argues that a similar process is behind confusion about whether or not Nie Chengyuan 聶承遠 really produced a truly independent version of the 超日明三昧經 T638.

Naitō remarks that if this is correct, it renders implausible the ascription to Dao'an of a remark recorded in GSZ: 案釋道安經錄云。安世高以漢桓帝建和二年至靈帝建寧中二十餘年譯出三十餘部經, T2059 (L) 324a8-10. This remarks appears to be a comment on a list of the CSZJJ type, which Naitō believes was not the form of Dao'an's catalogue; moreover, this remark is not reported at the relevant point in CSZJJ, which we would expect if it had indeed been in Dao'an's catalogue as used by Sengyou.

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