Daoist Terms in Early Chinese Buddhist Translations? A Reappraisal

It is commonly held that when Buddhism first arrived in China, this foreign religion was understood--or rather, misunderstood--through a Daoist conceptual lens. Early Buddhist translators, so the story goes, made free use of Daoist terminology, creating confusion that was only cleared up centuries later, when Kum?raj?va and his colleagues began to eliminate such terms from Buddhist discourse. According to this scenario, Chinese Buddhist translations followed a clear trajectory of "progress," with the inappropriate choices made by early translators being rectified in the more careful work of their successors.

 

Jan Nattier did her undergraduate work in comparative religion (specializing in Buddhism) at Indiana University, where she also began graduate training in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University under the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies (specializing in classical Mongolian and Tibetan). She has taught at Macalester College, the University of Hawaii, Stanford University, Indiana University, and the University of Tokyo, in addition to serving as a member of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology (Soka University). Her monographs include Once Upon a Time: Studies in a Buddhist Philosophy of Decline (Asian Humanities Press, 1991) and A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparip?cch?s?tra) (UHP, 2003), and A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations (IRIAB, Soka University, 2008). She is currently an independent scholar based in Hua Hin, Thailand.