Their story
According to the earliest Chinese records, An Shigao arrived at the Han capital, Luoyang, around 148 CE. His surname, An, was the Chinese way of indicating that he came from Anxi, the Parthian empire of Iran.
Tradition says he was a Parthian prince who gave up his claim to the throne to become a Buddhist monk. In Luoyang he worked with Chinese assistants for about twenty years, rendering texts on meditation and the analysis of mental states.
His translations use a plain and sometimes awkward Chinese, full of phrases coined for concepts that had no Chinese equivalent. About a dozen texts attributed to him are accepted by scholars as his.
The world they lived in
Buddhism entered China in the 1st century CE along the trade routes, first among foreign merchants. At the Han court, the Buddha was worshipped alongside the Daoist sage Laozi. Chinese had no vocabulary yet for Buddhist ideas.
Their contribution
He introduced Chinese readers to Buddhist meditation, above all the practice of mindfulness of breathing, and to the numbered lists of early Buddhist doctrine, laying the first foundations of a Chinese Buddhist vocabulary.
Teachings and works
Anban shouyi jing (Sūtra on Mindfulness of Breathing)
His best-known translation, with later commentary mixed into the text.
Translations of meditation and Abhidharma texts
Only a small part of the many works later attributed to him are accepted as genuinely his.
Related teachings
Their legacy
Later Chinese Buddhists honoured him as the founder of the tradition of translation, and his meditation texts were studied by the first Chinese Buddhist thinkers of the 3rd and 4th centuries.
History and tradition
What history can establish
His translations are among the earliest surviving Chinese Buddhist texts. The dates of his arrival and his royal birth come from Chinese catalogues and biographies compiled in the 5th and 6th centuries.
What Buddhist tradition remembers
Later biographies credit him with miraculous knowledge of his past lives, and tell of him meeting a former fellow monk reborn as a giant serpent in a lake and helping him to a better rebirth.
