The correct date of corpus is essential for the research of Chinese language history . The identification of corpus should also become an integral part of linguistic study . Buddhist sutra whose translation date is unknown or was wrongly recorded may have high linguistic value ,and its number is huge . However ,″discarding it″or″directly citing it″would have a detrimental effect on linguistic research ,while textual criticism might sort out reliable corpus and make up for the scarcity of data of the early medieval period . In this paper ,we shall examine the translation of Tanwudejiemo from philological ,lexical and cultural perspectives : historical documents show that it was not translated by Tandi (昙谛) in Caowei (曹魏);its lexis is closer to the Buddhist sutra after the Western Jin Dynasty ,and the″Commandment of Nun″was perfected only after the Western Jin Dynasty . Therefore ,the translation date of Tanwudejiemo could be no earlier than the Western Jin ,most probably by Tandi in Liusong (刘宋) . Finally ,we shall propose our solutions to the issues of the choice of reference Buddhist sutra ,extraction of differential words and application of textual criticism of such Buddhist sutra .