268 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
ings, works of art, and translations of scriptures. The Tuoba Turks of Northern
Wei embraced Buddhism vigorously, partly as a challenge to the Confucian
values of the civilization they sought to emulate and control. These imperial
sponsors, and later ones, brought to China the Indian practice of hollowing out
sanctuaries in steep cliffs: Dunhuang was one example; the vast stone images
of Buddha carved into the hills outside Luoyang were another.
It was, inevitably, a series of traveling monks—Indian, Chinese, and Cen-
tral Asian—who did the intellectual work of making the full complexity of
Indian Buddhism understood in China. Faxian went to India from 399 to 414
in search of texts he was certain must exist in so learned a land. Although he
found a thriving Buddhist culture in which kings respectfully bowed down
before monks—something that would never happen in China—he found very
few texts. Instead, Indian masters orally transmitted the dharma to their follow-
ers. But he learned Sanskrit, one of the few Chinese ever to master that difficult
language, and managed to bring a few translations back. In the meantime, the
great translator Kumarajiva arrived in Chang’an in 401 from Kucha in CentralBeginning in 493 B.C.E., Chinese emperors earned merit by sponsoring rock-carved images of the
Buddha near the old capital of Luoyang. The colossal Buddha in the distance is the grandest of
over 2,345 images carved into the rock cliff along the Yi River. Many of the images, carved in
deep relief, were hacked away from the rock and carried off by European collectors. Fortunately
this one, the grandest of all (the face is said to have been modeled after Empress Wu), was too
huge to steal.