The prince who became a translator
An Shigao came from Parthia, the Iranian empire west of Central Asia; the "An" in his name marks him as Parthian. Chinese Buddhist records say he was a prince who gave up his claim to the throne to become a monk, and that he reached Luoyang in 148 CE.
He is the first translator of Buddhist texts into Chinese whose work we can identify with some confidence.
What he translated
An Shigao's texts were not Mahāyāna. They dealt with meditation, especially mindfulness of breathing, and with the analysis of the mind and its elements found in early Buddhist teaching. Later catalogues credited him with dozens of works; modern scholars accept a much smaller number as genuinely his.
His Chinese is often difficult. Translators were still inventing a vocabulary for ideas that had no Chinese equivalent, and his work was probably done with Chinese assistants taking down his oral explanations.
The first translators
Around the same time, Lokakṣema, a monk from the Kushan realm, translated early Mahāyāna texts at Luoyang, including the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines in 179 CE. Between them, the two men began the vast project of Chinese Buddhist translation that would continue for a thousand years.
Why it matters
Translation becomes one of the most important forces in the globalization of Buddhism.
History and tradition
What historians can say
The date of 148 CE comes from later Chinese Buddhist records rather than contemporary evidence. Jan Nattier's study of the earliest translations identifies which of the texts attributed to An Shigao are likely to be genuinely his.
What Buddhist tradition remembers
Chinese tradition surrounds him with wonders, including stories that he understood the speech of birds and animals.