Kumarajiva

Influence

The translations associated with his name – executed both from Prakrits, i.e. vernacular forms of Sanskrit, and from early forms of Buddhist Sanskrit, into a form of classical Chinese – have enjoyed enormous success in the Sinitic tradition. This success is so great that even when, in the subsequent centuries, other scholars produced new and supposedly improved translations of the same texts, it has been the "Kumarajiva versions" that have remained in use in the devotional, exegetical, and literary life of East Asia up to the present day. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as the Sinitic Buddhist traditions have contributed to the emergence of a distinctly global modernist Buddhism, the Kumarajiva corpus of early fifth-century translations has been an implicit major presence.