From Kucha to Chang'an
Kumārajīva was born in Kucha, an oasis kingdom on the northern Silk Road, around 344 CE, to an Indian father and a Kuchean princess. He became a monk as a child, studied in Kashmir, and turned to Mahāyāna and the Middle Way philosophy of Nāgārjuna.
His fame reached China. In 384 a Chinese general captured Kucha and took him east, and he was held for some seventeen years in the frontier region of Liangzhou, where he learned Chinese well. In 401 the ruler Yao Xing brought him to the capital, Chang'an, and gave him a translation bureau.
The translations
Working with hundreds of monks and scholars, Kumārajīva produced some of the most important Chinese Buddhist texts: the Lotus Sūtra, the Diamond Sūtra, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, the shorter Amitābha Sūtra, and the works of Nāgārjuna's school. His versions read naturally in Chinese, rather than as awkward word-for-word renderings.
Through them, and through disciples such as Sengzhao and Daosheng, Madhyamaka philosophy and the great Mahāyāna sūtras entered the mainstream of Chinese thought.
Why it matters
Many of these translations remain standard texts in East Asian Buddhism today.
History and tradition
What historians can say
Kumārajīva's life is well recorded in Chinese biographies written within about a century of his death, though his dates are given variously, commonly as 344 to 413 CE. Many of his translations survive and are still in daily use.
What Buddhist tradition remembers
Tradition says he was forced by his captors to break his vows and marry, and told his disciples to take the lotus from the mud: to accept his translations, not his conduct. It also says his tongue did not burn when he was cremated, proof that his translations were true.