Kumārajīva
344 CE–413 CE · Kucha
c. 343/344–413 CE
Kumārajīva (c. 344–413 CE) was one of the greatest translators in history, the figure who gave Chinese Buddhism much of its classical vocabulary. Born in the Silk Road kingdom of Kucha to an Indian father and a Kuchean royal mother, he was captured when a Chinese army took Kucha to secure him, held for years at Liangzhou, and finally installed at Chang'an in 401, where his translation bureau produced the standard Chinese Lotus, Diamond, and Vimalakīrti sūtras and the Madhyamaka treatises that seeded the Sanlun school. His renderings remain the versions most Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhists read to this day. His life is unusually well documented.
Did you know?
Translations still recited after sixteen centuries
Kumārajīva (344–413), born in Kucha on the Silk Road and later working in Chang'an, produced Chinese renderings of texts such as the Lotus Sutra and the Diamond Sutra that remain the standard, widely recited versions across East Asia more than 1,600 years later.
How we know
Kumārajīva, c. 344–413 CE; born Kucha (Central Asia), translated at Chang'an under Later Qin patronage (arrived c. 401); his Lotus and Diamond Sutra renderings remain the standard East Asian versions. 2026 − 413 = 1,613 years (> 1,600).
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Kucha
What they did here
DOCUMENTED: born in this Silk Road oasis kingdom to an Indian father and a Kuchean princess mother; trained first in the non-Mahāyāna schools, then in Mahāyāna.
About Kucha
Kucha was an oasis kingdom on the northern Silk Road, on the rim of the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang, China, and a major centre of Buddhism in Central Asia. It was the birthplace of the great fourth–fifth-century translator Kumārajīva, who was later taken east into China and rendered many Mahāyāna scriptures into Chinese.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Kumārajīva’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Christian world
Graeco-Roman world
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.