Central Asia.A most interesting case exemplifying the
various possibilities is Central Asia, where various
forms of Buddhism coexisted during the second half
of the first millennium. First, there were some ethnic
groups, notably speakers of the two dialects of Tochar-
ian (the easternmost form of western Indo-European),
of the two Saka dialects, Tumshuq and Khotanese
(Middle Iranian), and of Uigur (a Turkish language),
who continued to use Sanskrit as their “church” lan-
guage, but also translated scriptures into their vernac-
ular and composed their own Buddhists texts. That
these ethnic groups transmitted scriptures in Sanskrit
is proven by the existence of a considerable number of
bilingual manuscripts and texts, manuscripts where
glosses in one of the local languages are added to a San-
skrit text between the lines, as well as texts, at least in
the case of the Tocharians and Uigurs, where the San-
skrit original and the vernacular translation alternate
word by word or sentence by sentence in the same line.
Second, there were the Chinese and the Tibetans, both
of whom translated Buddhist literature into their own
languages from the very beginning of missionary ac-
tivity in their countries. Finally, there is the specific
case of the Sogdians, speakers of another Middle Iran-
ian language, whose merchants must have been in-
strumental in spreading Indian Buddhism and its
literature from the Kushan empire to China. When
they started in the second half of the first millennium
to translate Buddhist texts into Sogdian, they did so
from Chinese translations of Indian originals. All this
can be gleaned from Central Asian manuscript finds,
and specifically from the walled-up library in DUN-
HUANG, where texts in all these different languages
were found side by side.
According to Jan Nattier no translation of an Indian
Buddhist text into a vernacular is found west of Kash-
gar, the westernmost town in the Tarim basin. So far,
recent manuscript finds in Afghanistan confirm her
view, since nearly all the texts are written in Indian lan-
guages. There is only one exception—a Buddhist text in
Bactrian, yet another Middle Iranian language, but at
present it is not clear whether it is a translation or a rit-
ual text written in the vernacular for a specific purpose.
China and East Asia.As soon as Buddhism reached
China it proved necessary to translate its texts into Chi-
nese. One reason for this must have been the extreme
grammatical and phonetic differences between Indian
languages and Chinese; another reason was the sheer
foreignness of Buddhism to the Chinese, whose highly
sophisticated and literary culture was distinguished by
rather different value systems and aesthetic percep-
tions. Translation techniques went through various
models and periods, starting with the second-century
translator ANSHIGAO, who made extensive use of the
vocabulary and other features of the spoken language.
This tendency to incorporate vernacular elements was
followed by a period that was characterized by an at-
tempt to employ Daoist vocabulary to express Bud-
dhist terms and ideas, and to write in a more literary
mode. A new standard was set during the fifth century
when the famous translator KUMARAJIVA(350–409/
413) introduced the translation bureau, a team of Chi-
nese and foreign specialists who, usually under state
patronage, jointly took care of the various steps in-
volved in the translation process. Similar institutions
were set up several times in the history of Central and
East Asian Buddhism—for example, in Tibet during
its imperial age, and later in Central Asia and China
for the translations of the Tangut, Mongol, and
Manchu versions of the tripitaka.As Chinese culture became paradigmatic through-
out East Asia, Buddhism went along with it. In its
Sinitic form, Buddhism spread to Korea, Japan, and
Vietnam, and literary Chinese became the “church”
language of Buddhist literature throughout East Asia.
In Central Asia, as mentioned above, Chinese transla-
tions served as the basis for all the translations into
Sogdian, but also for many into Uigur and some into
Tibetan. Between the eleventh and thirteenth cen-
turies, a considerable number of translations—first of
Chinese, then also of Tibetan translations of Buddhist
texts—were further translated into Tangut or Xixia,
another Sino-Tibetan language used in the Tangut
empire northwest of China, before its destruction by
Genghis Khan.Tibet and Mongolia. Buddhism reached Tibet
around the seventh century. From the very beginning,
apparently, texts were translated into the vernacular,
but they did not encounter an existing literary heritage
as they had in China; indeed the traditional sources in-
form us that the Tibetan script was created specifically
to translate Buddhist materials. A few of the early
translations are preserved. Their grammar is often
awkward, if not contrary to Tibetan usage, because of
their attempt to reproduce the word order of the In-
dian original, and different Tibetan words are em-
ployed to express the same Buddhist term. Another
difference from the situation in China concerned the
role of Buddhism in Tibet: It appears that from the be-
ginning Buddhism served domestic political purposesLANGUAGES