Kumārajīva translates the Buddhist scriptures in Chang’an

Kumārajīva (344–413) was the son of Kumārāyana, an Indian monk probably from Kashmir or Gandhara, and of Jīva, a sister of the king of Kucha, and was already a celebrated scholar of the Mahayana when the Former Qin general Lü Guang took Kucha in 384 and carried him off. From 386 he lived at Guzang, the capital of Lü Guang’s Later Liang, where, according to the Biographies of Eminent Monks, his hosts did not promote the Dharma and he kept his learning to himself. Yao Xing, ruler of the Later Qin at Chang’an and a devout Buddhist, repeatedly asked for him; in 401 he sent his general Yao Shuode against Lü Long, who submitted in the ninth month, and Kumārajīva reached Chang’an on the 20th day of the 12th month of the third year of Hongshi — 8 February 402 in the Julian calendar, although the date is usually given as 401, the year to which most of Hongshi 3 corresponds. Yao Xing honoured him as National Preceptor and installed him in the Ximing Pavilion and the Xiaoyao Garden to translate.

Kumārajīva knew many texts by heart and had learned Chinese; finding the old translations full of errors, he worked in public sessions with a large team — some 800 monks according to the Book of Wei, “more than 800” according to the Biographies of Eminent Monks, among them Sengzhao and Sengrui. He expounded the Sanskrit text while Yao Xing himself held the old version to compare. In about eleven years they produced some 35 works in 294 scrolls (the Biographies speak of more than 300): the Large and the Small Perfection of Wisdom sutras — the Small one, rendered anew in 408, had first been translated by Lokakṣema in 179 — the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra (406), the Vimalakīrti Sutra, the Amitābha Sutra, the monastic code of the Sarvāstivāda school and the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom, as well as the Middle, Hundred and Twelve Gates treatises of the Madhyamaka, on which the Sanlun (“Three Treatises”) school was based. His fluent style shaped the vocabulary of Chinese Buddhism, and his versions have remained more popular than later, more literal translations.

Yao Xing, saying that such a genius must not leave the seed of the Dharma without heirs, forced ten courtesans on him, and from then on Kumārajīva lived in a residence outside the monastery. He died in Chang’an — on the 13th day of the 4th month of the guichou year, aged seventy, that is 28 May 413, according to the funeral eulogy by his disciple Sengzhao. The Biographies of Eminent Monks give the 20th day of the 8th month of the eleventh year of Hongshi (15 September 409) and note that other records named the seventh or eighth year of Hongshi; the date usually accepted today is 413. Before he died he vowed that if his translations contained no error his tongue would not burn — and, the Biographies say, after his cremation in the Xiaoyao Garden it remained unburnt.