A number of early Chinese monastic catalogs offer a firm foothold for dating the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections to the late Eastern Han or early Three Kingdoms period. Sengyou’s Liang catalog (circa 515 CE) attributes its translation to Dharmarakṣa around 147 CE, a claim echoed in the Gaoseng Zhuan (530 CE). Lack of any corresponding Sanskrit manuscript in Central Asian sites, paired with a distinctly Chinese syntactic flavor, suggests a homegrown compilation during Buddhism’s formative century in China.

Modern philological studies—bolstered by the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association’s digital editions and 2023 Dunhuang finds—highlight vocabulary and doctrinal interpolations absent in early Indian sources. Recent Tarim Basin fragments (2024) underscore local adaptations rather than direct Indian imports, reinforcing the Eastern Han timeframe and challenging later reappraisals.

Key evidence: • Monastic catalogs: Sengyou’s Liang catalog and the Gaoseng Zhuan tie the text to Dharmarakṣa’s mid-2nd-century work.
• Absence of Sanskrit originals: No Indic archetype or parallel known, pointing to Chinese compilation.
• Philological analysis: Stylistic quirks and Chinese idioms embedded in the text date it to early sinicization of Buddhist discourse.
• Dunhuang and Tarim rediscoveries: Late 4th–5th-century manuscript layers show evolution rather than origination of the sutra.
• Modern digital humanities: CETA’s textual collation confirms an early recension more consistent with Han-era translations.

By and large, these strands weave a narrative that the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections emerged in China’s Eastern Han period, standing as one of the earliest bridges between Indian Buddhist thought and Chinese literary culture.