謄黃寺 The Temple of the Fair Copy
隨召翰林院及中書科各官謄寫真經。又建一寺在城之東，名曰謄黃寺。随召翰林院及中书科各官誊写真经。又建一寺在城之东，名曰誊黄寺。
逐句解 Line by line
He thereupon summoned the officers of the Hanlin Academy and the Secretariat Section to transcribe the true scriptures.
翰林院, the Hanlin Academy — the body of scholars who drafted the emperor's documents and who were, by common consent, the best writers in the empire. 中書科 is the Secretariat's copying office. So the finest calligraphers in China are put to work as scribes. The scriptures have gone from freight to filing to a copying job, in three passages.
And he built another monastery east of the city, and called it the Temple of the Fair Copy.
謄黃 — to transcribe onto yellow paper. Yellow was the imperial colour and the ground for official documents, and 謄黃 was the technical term for making the fair copy of an edict. So the emperor founds a monastery and names it after a clerical procedure. Not after a buddha, not after a virtue, not after the mountain or the journey: after the act of writing something out neatly on the correct stationery. It is the most quietly devastating name in the chapter, and the novel offers no comment at all.
The best calligraphers in the empire — the Hanlin Academy, the men who drafted the emperor's own documents — are set to work copying out the scriptures. In three passages the canon has gone from cargo to archive to a transcription job.
And then the emperor founds a monastery and names it after the procedure. Tenghuang means to transcribe onto yellow paper, which was the technical term for making the fair copy of an imperial edict on the correct official stationery.
Not named for a buddha, not for a virtue, not for the mountain or the road or the men who walked it. Named for neat handwriting. The novel puts it down in eleven characters and says nothing whatever about it.