Although there were earlier works of bibliography with respect to Buddhist texts at the time, Sengyou's
Collected Records Concerning the Tripitaka (
Chu sanzang ji ji) introduced important innovations in how the texts were arranged, including a hierarchy of authenticity. Not only were Buddhist texts continually trickling in along the
Silk Road, but the Chinese had begun to pass off local productions as authentic Indian
sutras. Sengyou proposed criteria for assessing the authenticity of Buddhist sutras at a time when many fake or apocryphal texts were in circulation. He was particularly focussed on the translator of a text, and this made him suspicious of unattributed texts. As Tanya Storch says, "Absence of information about the translator was a signal that it might be a compilation by a Chinese person who did not understand Sanskrit and had never studied Buddhism in the west [i.e. India]. The
Chu sanzang ji ji is presented in five sections • A discussion on the provenance of translated scriptures, • A record of (new) titles and their listings in earlier catalogues, • Prefaces to scriptures, • Miscellaneous treatises on specific doctrines, and • Biographies of translators. "By subjecting Buddhist scriptures to the textual criticism similar to that applied to the Confucian classics, Sengyou managed to elevate the literary and social status of the
Tripiṭaka.” At the Liang court, Sengyou's work was overshadowed by the catalogue of
Baochang () who produced his catalogue in 521 CE. However, it is Sengyou's catalogue that survives. Sengyou was assisted in his literary work by his student,
Liu Xie, who went on to write
Wenxin Diaolong, an important work on literary aesthetics. ==Bibliography==