The Four Hundred and Eighty Temples of the Southern Dynasties (合集 Omnibus) 南朝四百八十寺

This record contains the complete <i>Four Hundred and Eighty Temples of the Southern Dynasties project in three languages: the book itself (169 pieces in Chinese, 170 in English), its companion volume, the <i>Maps and Mind Maps Collection (161 chapters of commentary and 484 plates), and — new in this record — a text-to-speech utility that turns the chaptered plain text of the book into mp3 files. Each of the six editions is provided in epub and azw3, each atlas edition also as a vector PDF, and each edition additionally as a 7z archive of its source: twenty-four files in all. The work belongs to the series The Translation and Metabolism of Civilizations and is the tenth book in it.

The book is a history of Buddhism in the lower Yangtze between the fall of Wu in 280 and the Tang reunification, written as a study of one organization rather than of one man. Its subject is a river and an institution: the succession of short-lived dynasties along the Yangtze, and the Buddhist monastic order forming in that same ground. Wang Dao, Huan Wen, Liu Yu, Xiao Yan, Chen Baxian, Zhiyi and Jizang all appear, but none occupies a chapter of his own; they stand beside institutions, texts and images as bearers of structure. The question the book keeps asking is why an age of division and failed states produced the densest concentration of Buddhist thought in Chinese history — why, that is, the same four centuries that could not hold a dynasty together could build a religious order that outlived every one of them.

Its chapters follow the argument in five movements: the migration of the order southward after the fall of the north; the shift from thaumaturgy to scholasticism, and the schools that grew out of it; the economics of the monastery — lands, dependants, mills, loans, and the registers that taxed them; the state's attempts to count, rank and licence monks; and the eventual absorption of the order into an imperial religion. Every claim is checked against a source; where sources conflict they are set side by side rather than silently resolved; where a figure cannot be trusted it is marked with a qualifier or recorded as doubtful. Numerals for monks, monasteries and acres are given as approximations throughout, because the sources give approximations.

The companion <i>Maps and Mind Maps Collection draws the spatial and structural relations the text argues. Its 484 plates are of two kinds: layered-colour historical maps (terrain, river courses, commanderies, monastic sites, campaign routes, the Yangtze crossings) and mind maps that reduce a chapter's argument to a single diagram. Every plate is a vector drawing, one to a page, carrying its own title, caption and note on the sections of the text it corresponds to. The plates are schematic rather than surveyed: relief is impressionistic tiering, coastlines and river courses are modern, and positions are corrected against Tan Qixiang's <i>Historical Atlas of China.

The third component is a small program, the <i>TMC Text-to-Speech Player and MP3 Converter, supplied in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English editions. It reads a folder of chaptered text files, takes a range of file numbers, and synthesizes each piece into an mp3 through Microsoft Edge's online speech service (edge-tts), one file per chapter, at 24 kHz and 48 kbps; it can also play the text aloud without writing anything to disk. Playback uses the MCI interface built into Windows, so the only dependency is Python and edge-tts. The bundled instructions cover installing Python, installing edge-tts (including a mirror for mainland China), and what to do when the buttons appear greyed out — which means the interpreter in use has no edge-tts. The tool is included because the book is delivered as chaptered plain text: it is the shortest path from that text to an audio edition, and its behaviour is tied to this book's conventions of file numbering and chapter titling.

The Chinese text runs to roughly 4.5 million characters. The work was produced by a human author who set the themes, structure and discipline, gave chapter-by-chapter direction, and made every substantive judgement, with different AI systems drafting, expanding, revising, checking and de-duplicating in turn. It is therefore both a history and a long record of an experiment in human&ndash;AI collaborative writing; the preface states where the line of credibility is drawn and why.

The cover of the book reproduces <i>Yi Qu Tie (A Letter of Unusual Charm), attributed to Emperor Wu of Liang, collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei; the cover of the atlas reproduces a plate from the collection itself, <i>The Taikang Provinces and the Household Registers.

This is the work of an independent author. Non-profit redistribution and citation are permitted with attribution.

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本记录收录「南朝四百八十寺」项目的全部三语版本:文字书(中文一百六十九篇、英文一百七十篇)、配套的《地图和思维导图集》(一百六十一章释文、四百八十四幅图版),以及本次新增的一件朗读软件——它把本书的分章纯文本批量转成 mp3。六个版本各附 epub 与 azw3,图册另附矢量 PDF,每一版再附源文 7z 一件,共二十四件。本书属「文明的转译与代谢」书系,为第十种。

文字书写的是一段佛教史:自太康元年(280)吴亡,到唐代统一战争结束,长江下游四百年间佛教怎样从一个外来的信仰团体,长成一套能自我维持、能跨朝代延续的组织。全书的主语不是某一个人,而是一条江与一个组织——江是长江下游的政权更替,组织是佛教僧团在这片地方的成形。王导、桓温、刘裕、萧衍、陈霸先、智顗、吉藏都在书里出现,但不再各占一章,而是与制度、文本、造像并置,成为结构的承担者。全书反复追问的是:为什么一个对峙与短命王朝的时代,反而长出了中国佛教史上最密的一批思想。

四百年的事,分五段推进:北土陷落之后僧团怎样南渡;佛教怎样从方术走到义学,又怎样从义学走出宗派;寺院的账——田、奴婢、碾硙、质库,以及替它们记账的僧籍与寺额;国家怎样一次次试图点数、定级、给牒;最后是这套组织怎样被帝国的宗教收编。全书史实凡引必核;遇两说并存则并陈而不默取其一;核不到者标存疑。僧尼数、寺数、田亩数,各书所记不同,一律加「约」;加约而仍不敢自信者,入存疑。

配套的《地图和思维导图集》把正文所论的空间与结构关系画出来。四百八十四幅图版分两类:分层设色的历史地图(地形、江道、州郡、寺院分布、行军路线、渡口),以及把一章论证压成一张图的思维导图。图版全部为矢量绘制,一图一页,自带图题、图注与所对应正文节数。图是示意性的,不是实测:山体为写意分层,岸线与江道取今势,点位以谭其骧《中国历史地图集》为基准校正。

第三件是随书的朗读软件「TMC 专用文本语音播放和转换mp3软件」,简体、繁體、English 各一版。它读入一个装着分章文本的目录,给一个文件号区间,逐篇调用微软 Edge 的在线朗读接口(edge-tts)合成 mp3,一章一个文件,24 kHz、48 kbps;也可以不落盘、直接现场听。播放走 Windows 自带的 MCI,故除 Python 外只依赖 edge-tts。包内说明写清了 Python 与 edge-tts 的安装、国内镜像、以及「按钮是灰的怎么办」。之所以随书发布,是因为本书以分章纯文本交付,这个软件是那批文本通向有声读物的最短路径,且它的行为与本书的文件编号与章题体例绑定。

文字书中文版全文约四百五十万字符。本书由人类提出主题、命题、体例与纪律,逐章给出方向,并对所有关键判断作最终裁决;不同的智能体分任起草、加厚、修订、机检与查重。它因此同时是一部佛教史和一份长篇人机协作写作的实验记录,可信度的边界写在序言里。

文字书封面取自传为梁武帝所书《异趣帖》(台北故宫博物院藏);图册封面取自本集图版《太康分州与南北户口》。

本作品为独立作者的学术著作,允许在署名前提下非盈利再分发与引用。