Chapter 1. Transmission and early sūtra translation: An Shigao, Lokakṣema, and Dao'an¶

Essay 9 discussed Southern Buddhism; this essay turns to Chinese Buddhism. In a sense, the history of Chinese Buddhism encompasses all the translation, misreading, transformation, and creation that took place when Buddhism encountered China, a culture with a mature civilization of its own. Over several centuries of countless accommodations and conflicts, Buddhism eventually developed some of the world's most original schools here.

The chapter follows Buddhism's arrival and the work of its first translators, then examines how Dao'an first organized and criticized their early work systematically.

1. Routes and dates of transmission¶

Several routes

Buddhism entered China along several parallel routes.

The overland Silk Road ran eastward through the steppes and oasis cities of Central Asia (Sogdiana, Bactria, the Kushan territories, and elsewhere), then across present-day Xinjiang along the northern and southern routes around the Tarim Basin. It reached Dunhuang, passed through the Hexi Corridor, and finally arrived at the Han capital of Luoyang or Chang'an. It was the principal early route and the direction from which the sources for the earliest Chinese Buddhist translations came.

The maritime route crossed the Indian Ocean, passed through the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, and reached Jiaozhi, in present-day northern Vietnam, before continuing north into inland China. It became increasingly important after the Wei and Jin periods. Faxian (337 to 422), of the Eastern Jin, went to India by land and returned by sea.

The early translators who came to China along the overland Silk Road came chiefly from two Central Asian cultural regions. One was Parthia, in present-day eastern Iran, known in Chinese as Anxi and abbreviated as "An." The other was the Yuezhi/Kushan realm; "Zhi" abbreviates Yuezhi. An Shigao came from Parthia, and Zhi Loujiachen from the Yuezhi. These geographical markers in their names are important clues to this history.

Legend of the Chinese source map: Routes by which Buddhism entered China, first–fifth centuries CE. Red dashed arrows mark the main overland Silk Road; ochre dashed arrows mark the southern Tarim route; blue arrows mark the maritime route; green dashed arrows mark Faxian’s outward and return journey. Place labels identify Parthia, the Kushan realm, northwestern India (a principal source region for Buddhism), the Himalayas, the Tarim Basin, Kashgar, Khotan, Loulan, Dunhuang, Chang’an, Luoyang (the Eastern Han capital), Jiaozhi, and Sri Lanka. The side panels read: White Horse Temple—65 CE—Prince Liu Ying of Chu’s “Buddhist shrine”; around 148, An Shigao reaches Luoyang by the Parthian route and translates meditation scriptures and Abhidharma; around 167, Lokakṣema reaches Luoyang by the Kushan route; around 170, he translates the Daoxing bore jing (Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā); Faxian, 337–422, goes to India by land and returns to China by sea.

The map is schematic. The date 65 CE concerns the record of Prince Liu Ying’s Buddhist observances; it does not establish the founding date of White Horse Temple. The chapter distinguishes that record from the temple’s foundation legend. Exact paths, connections, and arrow directions in the illustration should not be read as independently verified itineraries.

The approximate date of arrival

The exact date when Buddhism entered China remains unsettled. The best-known account places it in Emperor Ming of Han's Yongping reign (58 to 75). The emperor dreamed at night of a golden figure flying toward him and sent envoys to India to seek the Dharma. They returned with Kāśyapa Mātaṅga and Dharmaratna, who translated the Sūtra in Forty-two Sections; White Horse Temple was built in Luoyang. This is the legend of China's first Buddhist temple.

Historians generally regard this story as an accumulation of legends rather than a historical record. Whether an early version of the Sūtra in Forty-two Sections was actually translated by Kāśyapa Mātaṅga is heavily disputed. Moreover, an emperor's nocturnal dream introducing a new religion is a common narrative device for legitimizing religious transmission across cultures; in itself it proves little.¹

The earliest historical record that can be confirmed is an edict issued by Emperor Ming in 65 CE, the eighth year of Yongping. It mentions Liu Ying, Prince of Chu, son of Emperor Guangwu and Emperor Ming's younger half-brother, who "honors the benevolent rites of the Buddha, observes purification and fasting for three months, and makes a vow with the spirits." Here futu (Buddha) clearly refers to Buddhism. The passage shows that by 65 at the latest, Buddhism was present in Han royal circles and had acquired some adherents. It is the earliest reliable historical record currently available.¹

In this book's account, the earliest documented Buddhism in China dates to the first century CE, and Emperor Ming's dream is a later narrative of legitimation. White Horse Temple was founded before large-scale sūtra translation began, but the precise circumstances of its founding can no longer be established.

2. The setting: upheaval and an intellectual vacuum¶

The arrival of Buddhism in China on a large scale coincided with the political turmoil from the late Han through the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties, roughly the second to sixth centuries. This was no coincidence.

In the late Eastern Han, political crises shook the authority of Confucianism as the state ideology. Daoist thought rose in prominence, particularly the "pure conversation" strand of xuanxue, or Learning of the Mysterious. Yet it offered chiefly a spiritual refuge for the literati, with less direct responses to suffering, life, and death. At precisely this point, Buddhism offered a fairly complete set of answers. It addressed life and death directly through rebirth and liberation, explained suffering cosmologically through karma, and provided detailed guidance for practice directed beyond worldly life. It also offered a religious community, the saṅgha, that could cross social class boundaries.

The history cannot be reduced to Buddhism "filling a gap." China's intellectual traditions were active; Confucianism and Daoism did not wither with Buddhism's arrival. The intellectual encounter changed both sides and cannot be described as reception in one direction.

3. An Shigao: foundations in meditation texts and Abhidharma¶

Life

An Shigao was active in Luoyang around 148 to 170. Tradition describes him as a Parthian crown prince who relinquished his throne to become a monk, traveled widely, and arrived in Luoyang, where he devoted the next twenty years to translating sūtras. The biographical details have limited historical reliability, but his prolonged activity in Luoyang and extensive translation work are well supported by documentary evidence.

His place as the first historically attested systematic translator of Buddhist texts in China is beyond dispute.

What he translated

An Shigao's translations concentrated chiefly on meditation and Abhidharma.

Meditation literature included his many translations of texts on meditative practice (dhyāna), collectively known as "meditation sūtras." The most important was the Anban shouyi jing (Ānāpānasati Sūtra, on the practice of awareness of breathing). These texts attend to observation of the body and breath and directly influenced later Chinese meditation traditions.

Abhidharma literature formed another part of his work. He translated several texts belonging to the Abhidharma traditions of the Buddhist schools, including the Yinchi ru jing, which discusses such analytical frameworks as the five aggregates, twelve sense bases, and eighteen elements, and the Da daodi jing. These texts introduced early Buddhism's detailed analysis of mental and bodily experience.

An Shigao's translations included no Mahāyāna sūtras. What he brought was meditation and doctrinal analysis from early Buddhism in its school traditions, not the Mahāyāna narratives of the Prajñāpāramitā or Avataṃsaka literature. This gave the earliest Chinese understanding of Buddhism a foundation in meditation and Abhidharma.¹

Problems of translation method

For technical terminology, An Shigao's translations borrowed extensively from the Daoist vocabulary already available in China. "Dao" rendered dharma, and the Chinese term for "nonaction" rendered nirvāṇa, among other borrowings. Such borrowing was unavoidable at the time because a specifically Buddhist Chinese vocabulary did not yet exist. But it also produced profound misreadings by fitting Indian concepts into a Daoist framework of thought, giving rise to the "matching concepts" discussed in the next chapter.

His translation team provided the model for all later large-scale sūtra translation. A foreign monk dictated, while a group of Chinese scholars recorded and polished the text.

4. Lokakṣema (Zhi Chen): the first Mahāyāna voices¶

Life

Zhi Loujiachen (Zhī Lóu Jiā Chèn), usually shortened to "Zhi Chen," came from the Yuezhi, within the Kushan Empire. He was active in Luoyang around 167 to 186, roughly contemporary with An Shigao, but brought a radically different Buddhism.

What he translated

If An Shigao represents early Buddhism's traditions of meditation and doctrinal analysis, Lokakṣema represents the first arrival of Mahāyāna Prajñāpāramitā and Pure Land faith. His principal translations were:

The Daoxing bore jing, known in Sanskrit as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, or Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, is one of the earliest texts in the Prajñāpāramitā corpus. Lokakṣema translated it in 170, marking the beginning of the entire Prajñāpāramitā literature's entry into China.

The Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra (Banzhou sanmei jing) centers on the practice of recollecting the Buddha, Amitābha. It teaches that doing so to a sufficient degree enables practitioners to see buddhas directly in meditation. It later became one of the Pure Land school's most important scriptural foundations.

The Sūtra of Akṣobhya's Buddha Land describes the Pure Land of Akṣobhya, the Immovable Buddha of the east. Existing alongside the Amitābha Pure Land that later became dominant, it shows that the early landscape of Pure Land faith was more diverse.

The significance of Lokakṣema's translations

Lokakṣema's translations introduced the textual foundations of both Prajñāpāramitā emptiness and Pure Land faith, two strands crucial to the later development of Chinese Buddhism. Nāgārjuna could influence China because Lokakṣema had already translated the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras into Chinese. The Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra's account of contemplative Buddha-recollection provided the earliest scriptural support for Pure Land Buddhism to take root in China.

Lokakṣema's style was freer than An Shigao's. He favored fluent Chinese expression to convey the meaning rather than following the original's structure word for word.

5. Methods and difficulties of early sūtra translation¶

Translating Sanskrit, or versions in various Central Asian languages, into Chinese was extremely difficult at the level of linguistic structure. The early translators had to find their way without precedents.

Fundamental differences in linguistic structure

Sanskrit is a highly inflected language whose word forms vary with case, number, person, and so on. Chinese is an isolating language, with essentially no inflection; it conveys meaning through word order and function words. Expressing the "five aggregates," "twelve sense bases," or "emptiness" in Chinese required more than finding equivalent words. An entire framework of thought had to be transplanted. Chinese readers already possessed two complete intellectual frameworks, Confucianism and Daoism, and would inevitably understand the new concepts through them.

Collaborative translation

The standard early procedure was collaborative translation. A foreign monk, usually conversant in Sanskrit or a Central Asian language, dictated; a group of Chinese scholars, usually literate in Chinese but unfamiliar with Sanskrit, recorded his words and then polished the language. This procedure could produce Chinese texts quickly, but the participants' mutual understanding was often incomplete. The speaker might have limited Chinese, and the scribes a limited understanding of the Dharma. Their misunderstandings would become fixed in the process of translation.

The cost of using Daoist and xuanxue vocabulary

The most serious early problem was the use of Daoist vocabulary, especially that of Laozi and Zhuangzi, or of xuanxue, to translate Buddhist concepts.

• Sanskrit dharma (fa, the Dharma) → Chinese "Dao": the Buddha's Dharma and the Dao are not the same thing, but Chinese readers would bring the associations of "Dao" to their reading of fa.
• Sanskrit nirvāṇa → Chinese wuwei, "nonaction": in Daoism, nonaction is a cosmic condition of "not forcing things," quite different from nirvāṇa's "cessation of suffering." Yet the two terms share a superficial resemblance in "going beyond all contrivance."
• Sanskrit prajñā (wisdom) → Chinese benwu, "original nonbeing," or xuwu, "nothingness": the wisdom of emptiness in Prajñāpāramitā was fitted into a Daoist philosophy of nothingness.

Confusing these concepts may have helped Buddhism spread at the time ("Ah, so the Buddha's teaching has something in common with Laozi and Zhuangzi"). Epistemologically, however, it conflated two different philosophies and caused serious misreadings of Buddhism during its first few centuries in China. The next chapter on "matching concepts" addresses this problem.

6. Dao'an: organization and criticism¶

Life

More than a century after An Shigao and Lokakṣema, Dao'an (312–385) offered the most important reflection on the early state of Chinese Buddhism. Born in the northeast, he received a Confucian education as a child before becoming a monk. The upheavals of the Sixteen Kingdoms period kept him on the move throughout his life, across what are now Shanxi, Henan, Hubei, and other regions. Eventually he settled in Chang'an under the protection of the Fu clan's Qin regime and devoted himself to organizing Buddhist texts.²

Compiling a catalogue

Dao'an's first major undertaking was a catalogue of Buddhist texts, parts of which survive as Dao'an's Catalogue, or the Comprehensive Catalogue of the Sūtras. It was the first systematic bibliography of Buddhist literature in Chinese history. It classified the Buddhist texts then circulating in China by translator, period, and reliability, and identified "suspect scriptures" of uncertain origin. These might be Chinese fabrications falsely attributed to Buddhist authority rather than translations of Indian originals.

Dao'an's cataloguing went far beyond "organization." He recognized the uneven quality of the "Buddhist sūtras" circulating in China. Some were translations of genuine Sanskrit originals; others might be Chinese forgeries; still others derived from authentic originals but had suffered serious distortion in translation. He sought to treat this literature critically, an advanced scholarly stance for his time.

Five losses of the original and three difficulties

Dao'an's reflections on translation found their clearest expression in his "five losses of the original and three difficulties."²

The "five losses of the original" are five ways in which translation loses the original meaning. First, customary Sanskrit and Chinese word order differ; accommodating Chinese word order loses the original structure. Second, the original is plain, and embellishing its language to suit readers loses its meaning. Third, the original contains repeated verses, which translators often omit. Fourth, it contains explanatory asides, which translators often remove. Fifth, it recapitulates and summarizes a passage after completing it, and translators delete these as repetitions.

The "three difficulties" concern three challenges in translation. First, the present is used to interpret antiquity, this place to interpret that time; the distance between sages and ordinary people is immense, and complete communication is difficult. Second, Chinese sages have traditionally valued simplicity; adorning the language to accommodate readers loses the plain virtue of scripture. Third, even eyewitnesses such as Ānanda had to ask the Buddha repeatedly to restate his teaching at the time, whereas today's translators know those circumstances only through accounts handed down across generations, yet must present them fully and faithfully.

Dao'an's reflections were the first systematic consideration of method in the history of Chinese Buddhist translation, preceding Xuanzang's theory of translation by more than two centuries. They moved from technical problems to the fundamental predicament of translating across cultures. The gulf between two languages, two cultures, and two periods can never be crossed completely; distortion can only be reduced as far as possible.

Criticism of "matching concepts"

Dao'an also explicitly criticized the then-popular practice of "matching concepts," here using the term broadly for explaining Buddhist doctrine through Confucian and Daoist concepts. This must be distinguished from technical geyi, the item-by-item matching of numbered lists, as discussed in the next chapter. He held that although this made Buddhism more accessible to Chinese readers, it did so at the cost of distorting Buddhism's substantive meaning into Confucian and Daoist forms. He insisted on understanding Buddhist texts' original meanings directly, without interpreting them through Confucian or Daoist frameworks.

Seeking the Dharma and Kumārajīva

Dao'an was directly involved in another important historical event. He wrote to the Fu Qin court, then in Chang'an, asking it to invite a great scholar from the Western Regions who knew Sanskrit thoroughly and could supply reliable original texts, to remedy China's longstanding problems with the quality of sūtra translation. Fu Jian sent an army to Kucha and brought back Kumārajīva. Dao'an, however, died in 385, sixteen years before Kumārajīva reached Chang'an in 401, and never saw the arrival of the "reliable translator" he had long awaited. Kumārajīva's profound influence on Chinese Buddhism will be discussed in Chapter 10.3.

7. The early character of Chinese Buddhism¶

From An Shigao to Dao'an, roughly 148 to 385 CE, some 240 years elapsed. During this period, Chinese Buddhism acquired several early features that would profoundly shape its subsequent direction.

Two different strands of transmission spread in China simultaneously. An Shigao brought meditation and Abhidharma, oriented toward early Buddhism; Lokakṣema brought Prajñāpāramitā and Mahāyāna Pure Land faith, oriented toward Mahāyāna. From the outset, there was no single face of "Buddhism"; it was a plural tradition full of internal tensions.

Entanglement with Daoism began with the use of Daoist vocabulary to translate Buddhist concepts, an unavoidable historical condition of early Chinese Buddhism. It was also the historical source of the later incorporation of Daoist thinking into the doctrines of Tiantai, Huayan, and other schools. The entanglement remains indispensable background for understanding Chinese Buddhism today.

Reception through elite culture characterized Buddhism's early arrival in China. Its principal early recipients were royalty and the educated literati; its first entry began with elite culture, not with the populace. It entered Southeast Asia in a similar way, where royalty adopted it first and it then spread to the wider population.

A tradition of critical organization was established through Dao'an's cataloguing and translation criticism, an important methodological foundation for Chinese Buddhism. Instead of simply accepting "Buddhist sūtras" as authoritative texts, it asked where they came from, how reliable their translations were, and how they related to other texts. The critical tradition continued in later scholarship, including Dunhuang studies and textual collation.

References¶