Their story
Kumārajīva was born in 344, the usual date, in the Silk Road kingdom of Kucha, to an Indian father and a Kuchean princess who became a nun. As a boy he travelled with his mother to Kashmir to study the Abhidharma of the older schools.
In Kashgar he turned to the Mahāyāna and the philosophy of Nāgārjuna, and returned to Kucha famous as a scholar. In 384 a Chinese general, Lü Guang, captured Kucha and carried him off to Liangzhou, where he was held for about seventeen years and, the sources say, forced to break his monastic vows.
In 401 the ruler of the Later Qin dynasty, Yao Xing, brought him to Chang'an with great honour and gave him a translation bureau of hundreds of monks. In the twelve years until his death he produced some thirty-five works, in a Chinese of such clarity and grace that they displaced earlier versions.
The world they lived in
North China was divided among short-lived kingdoms, several ruled by non-Chinese dynasties who were eager patrons of Buddhism. Chinese monks had read Buddhist texts for two centuries, but in versions that often misled them, using Daoist terms for Buddhist ideas.
Their contribution
He translated not word for word but for meaning, with teams of Chinese scholars who polished the language. He also taught: his students, such as Sengzhao and Daosheng, became the first great Chinese Buddhist philosophers.
Teachings and works
The Lotus Sūtra (Miaofa lianhua jing)
The Diamond Sūtra and the Vimalakīrti Sūtra
The Amitābha Sūtra (Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha)
Nāgārjuna's Middle Treatise, Āryadeva's Hundred Treatise and the Twelve Gate Treatise
The basis of the Chinese Sanlun ('Three Treatise') school.
Dazhidu lun (Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom)
Attributed to Nāgārjuna; scholars debate how much Kumārajīva added.
Related teachings
Their legacy
His Lotus Sūtra shaped the Tiantai, Tendai and Nichiren traditions; his Diamond Sūtra is the text printed in 868 at Dunhuang, the world's oldest dated printed book; his Amitābha Sūtra is chanted daily in Pure Land temples.
History and tradition
What history can establish
His life is well recorded by Chinese biographers of the 5th and 6th centuries, some writing within living memory, though they disagree about his dates.
What Buddhist tradition remembers
Tradition says he asked that, if his translations were true, his tongue would not burn on his funeral pyre, and that it was found unburned. A stupa said to hold it stands at Wuwei in Gansu.
