Two armies were sent to fetch one monk, and China's Buddhism changed
Kumārajīva was so famous that a Chinese emperor dispatched an army to conquer his homeland and bring him back, and a later ruler sent another to free him from the warlords holding him. Once in Chang'an, his translation team gave Chinese readers the Lotus and Diamond Sutras in a clarity nobody had managed before.
He was born in 344 in Kucha, a Tocharian-speaking city-state in the Tarim Basin, in what is now Xinjiang. His father, Kumārāyana, was an Indian monk probably from Kashmir or Gandhāra who had crossed the Pamirs and so impressed Kucha's king that he was offered the king's younger sister, Jīva, in marriage. Jīva entered a nunnery when her son was seven, and from nine he studied Sarvastivada scholasticism in North India, Kashmir and Kucha before a Kashmiri teacher in Kashgar won him over to Mahayana. Fully ordained at twenty, he became known across the Buddhist world for his learning and his skill in debate.
Word of him reached China in 379 through a visiting monk. The Former Qin emperor Fu Jian sent his general Lü Guang to seize Kucha and bring the scholar east. But Fu Jian's main army collapsed, Lü Guang set up his own state instead, and Kumārajīva spent years as a hostage of the Lü family. The Later Qin ruler Yao Xing pleaded for his release, then sent troops to Liangzhou, and in 401 the monk finally arrived in Chang'an.
Named National Preceptor, he led a court-sponsored bureau at the Xiaoyao Gardens. Translation was a committee process he guided rather than a solo feat, with his amanuensis Sengrui among the team. The group abandoned the older habit of borrowing Daoist and Confucian terms for Buddhist ideas, coined lasting vocabulary such as the Chinese word for Mahayana, and devised a way of spelling out Sanskrit sounds with Chinese characters. About fifty-two translations in the modern canon are accepted as his, including Madhyamaka treatises that founded the Three Treatise school.
He was later accused of trimming texts, with the pilgrim Xuanzang held up as more exact. The scholar Jan Nattier argues this is mistaken: where Kumārajīva's work can be checked against surviving Indic manuscripts, it holds up surprisingly well. The Buddhist scholar Lu Cheng judged his translations unmatched in both technique and fidelity. He died in 413.
Source: Kumārajīva
