Retrieving Buddhist texts -- more to the story

Today we have been discussing the impact that individuals have on our understanding of history. Our understanding, however, is also derived in forms other than a traveler's account. We know that Fa-hsien left his "Records of Buddhistic Kingdom" as a history of Gupta India. However, he had an even larger impact by bringing back to China the texts of Mayahana and Hinayana Buddhism from India. Well, should we say a larger impact or larger challenge? Now that the sutras are in China, what do you do with them - they are in a different language!

It was up to the Chinese Buddhist monk, Kumarajiva, to translate the sutras into Chinese. This was an incredible undertaking because the sutras are derived from not only a different language, but a different culture. "Particularly vexing was the need to introduce unfamiliar concepts a the very heart of Buddhism. Just as Christians would later agonize over ways of translating "God" into Chinese, Buddhists racked their brains over works like "Nirvana." (A Brief History of Chinese Culture by Conrad Shirokauer, p. 88)

Monks eventually took up the practice of transliteration "to employ Chinese characters to approximate the sound rather than the meaning of the original word....the results were apt to be unwieldy and sometimes even misleading, since in relatively modern times the Chinese reader has found it difficult to divorce the characters from their meanings" (Shirokauer, 88).

So, when we discuss the impact of individuals, it also leads to the idea of syncretism as society tries to understand and to adopt cultural aspects from other places. The excerpts above simply gives a glimpse about what parts of the process of syncretism are and how these individuals have shaped their own history and our understanding of their history.