Kumarajiva

He was born in a noble family,but experienced distress. He was famous, but controversial; he, the eminent monk as famous as Xuanzang, called the classic translator is the Buddhist translator Kumarajiva.

Kumarajiva (from 344 to 413) whose ancestral home was Tianzhu, was born in Kuci in the Western Region (now Kuche, Xinjiang) and he was an eminent monk of Houqin in the East Jin Dynasty, the famous sutras translator in the history of China.

After entering Chang’an, Kumarajiva started to translate sutras on a large scale. There are many newly created nouns and transliteration nouns in his translation. Many familiar sutras vocabulary has become common words in our life, enriching not only vocabulary of Chinese but also our mind and life.

Though Kumarajiva just translated Buddhist books and records, his influence is quite beyond Buddhism. The famous books he translated make Buddhism parallels Confucianism and Taoism and thus form three ideological systems in China.

The spread of Buddhism into China is a big event in human history and its spread in Chinais closely related to the development of the Silk Road. There were many who spread Buddhism on the Belt and Road, of whom there were quite a few who stepped out but among the stepped inside people Kumarajiva was the most famous.

Kumarajiva came to China when there was the first large-scale cultural collision between foreign culture and local culture in China. Kumarajiva corrected mistakes or vague things in previous translation and explained Buddhist sutras in new viewpoints, breaking the situation in which mistaken explanations were given. These Buddhist sutras were then spread to Korea and Japan etc. through the Silk Road and profoundly influenced these countries.