The “First Age” of Translation

Buddhist ideas were transmitted to China over a period of several hundred years, originally via Central Asia and later through direct contact with Indian believers. Translation was essential to this process of conversion—arguably the most consequential in world history—but the mechanisms of translation remain unfamiliar. Documents indicate that for the first three centuries of Buddhist influence, source texts in Indic languages were almost never directly accessible to the Chinese “translators,” who worked, rather, from paraphrases dictated by speakers of one or another Central Asian language; these paraphrases were then worked up into acceptable literary Chinese by scribes unacquainted with Sanskrit, Pali, or any other foreign tongue. The means whereby Buddhist ideas achieved acceptance in China therefore had little to do with fidelity to an original and much to do with adaptation to the Chinese cultural context through patchworks and redeployments of Chinese predecessor texts with little or no relation to Indian thought.

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