94 xavier tremblayinterpreters, perhaps because they were the most numerous or the
best organised western foreigners who permanently dwelled in China
and who acted as proxeni for all western affairs, including Buddhism.^88
Some early colophons describe the translation procedure: a foreign
monk, knowing no or very little Chinese, recited the text, which was
translated by an interpreter, noted by Chinese monks and devoted
laymen, and then commented upon.^89 The Chinese memoria lists of
Buddhism were probably more concerned with these interpreters who
acclimatised Buddhism to the Chinese aristocratic circles, than with
those that we would deem in the rst instance to be the introducers
of Buddhism on Chinese soil, namely Indian monks preaching among
foreigners or bringing manuscripts. This can explain the relative rar-
ity of natives of Kucha, Agni, Turfan or Loulan—all cities with far
older Buddhist traditions than Sogdiana—among the early translators
mentioned in Chinese records. The natives of these cities were prob-
ably more numerous among the common monks, and were mostly not
of cial interpreters. Most “introducers” of Buddhism in this peculiar
“translator” sense may have been Sogdians. It does not mean in any
way that before the Sogdians translated texts, there were no Buddhists
in China. It is even not improbable that the earliest Sogdian interpret-
ers have only been converted to Buddhism in China, by Bactrians and
Indians. Anyway, in Sogdiana, the Kua or Indian input is almost
nil before the fth century.^90
To sum up, Buddhist Sogdians lived mostly, and at the beginning
probably solely, in China and in the Tarim Basin. Sogdian Buddhism is
but a part of Chinese Buddhism and participates in all its tendencies,
including Chan Buddhism.^91 It also seems to have had strong magical-
syncretistic tendencies: the Paris manuscript P.3, compiled to produce
rain (an obsession in these dry lands), on the one hand advises using a
mntr (the description of which makes clear that it was a maala probably
borrowed from tantrism), but on the other hand also contains Mazdean
terms (Sogd. wp’pntrw 131 = Avestan gandar upp ) and a Mazdean(^88) About the connexion between early Buddhism and the Da honglu , the
minister controlling the foreign envoys under the Han, cf. Zürcher 1959, vol. 1, pp.
38f. The Chinese of cial in charge of Iranian cults did not bear a religious title, but
was called sabao < EMC sat-paw < Sogd. s’rtp’w < srtha-pôan-, on Irano-Indian
hybrid name for the “caravaneer” (Yoshida 1988, pp. 168–171).
(^89) Zürcher 1959, vol. 1, p. 31.
(^90) Grenet 1996, pp. 367–370; La Vaissière 2002, p. 167.
(^91) Yoshida 1996, p. 167.
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