What the Losses Mean for the Record

The decade matters to a reference work for a reason beyond the history itself. A great deal of what was destroyed was unique: manuscripts held in single copies at a single monastery, images that were the only surviving example of a local form, lineage records, ordination registers and the physical fabric of buildings that had stood for centuries. Where those are gone, the entries a catalogue can write about the traditions concerned are correspondingly thinner, and the gaps are not evenly distributed. Traditions with printed canons circulating internationally lost less than traditions whose transmission was local and oral.

Meir Shahar's history of the Shaolin monastery is a useful illustration of what recovery looks like in practice, since the site was damaged, emptied and later rebuilt and heavily commercialised, and disentangling the pre 1966 institution from its reconstruction is a real scholarly problem. Public religious life resumed after 1976 under a policy that recognised five religious associations, and the following decades saw very substantial rebuilding and growth. The atlas records both the losses and the revival, and flags where an entry rests on evidence that has itself been reconstructed rather than continuously preserved.