Song Lian，who was regarded as the head of civil servants in the early Ming Dynasty by Zhu Yuanzhang，recorded and wrote a large number of materials and biographies about Japanese monks who came to China in the early Ming Dynasty. These documents have become an important source for exploring Chinese and Japanese Buddhism in the early Ming Dynasty. According to Song Lian’s records，there were two main types of Buddhist exchanges between China and Japan in the early Ming Dynasty. One was that some monks served as envoys of the two governments，and the other was that some Japanese monks came to China to study Buddhism. Serving as diplomats between the two countries，on the one hand，these Buddhist monks’ activities carried political and diplomatic features，and on the other，they strengthened the religious and cultural exchanges between the two countries. Even under the circumstance that the rulers of the two countries were confronting each other，still they enabled the non-governmental cultural exchanges to continue to move forward. Japanese monks visited Chinese Zen monks all around China，studied Zen，and developed their own Zen Buddhism after returning to Japan；Chinese monks who entered Japan spread Buddhism and Zen practice widely there，and made great contributions to the development of Japanese Buddhism.