佛祖歷代通載 6.9

6.9

3. In the first year of the Taishi era, the monk Dharmarakṣa from the realm of the Yuezhi—in Jin called Fahu—arrived in Luoyang. Dharmarakṣa had thoroughly investigated the arts of the thirty-six kingdoms and was also fluent in their languages. He had brought back a vast collection of Sanskrit manuscripts of brahmanical and Buddhist scriptures from India, reaching Yumen, and consequently settled in Dunhuang; contemporaries called him the Bodhisattva of Dunhuang. Later, he traveled through the city of Luoyang and reached Jiangzuo. During the Yongjia era, he translated sūtras wherever he stayed, never pausing even briefly. At that time, the upāsaka Nie Chengyuan held the brush and assisted in the translation of nearly four hundred fascicles. When Chengyuan died, his son Daozhen consulted, received instructions from, and served Dharmarakṣa; besides the transcriptions he recorded, Daozhen translated over sixty fascicles of scriptures on his own. At that time, the Jin monks Shi Faju, Fali, and Zhi Mindu, as well as the upāsaka Wei Shidu and others, translated various scriptures. In addition, Faju, Fali, and their circle constantly compared and collated texts, organizing them into sections and categories according to differences and similarities in their expansive and abridged versions, amounting to more than one hundred and forty fascicles in all. Furthermore, there were the monks Kalaṅka, An Famin, Zhu Shulan, Bo Fazu, Zhi Fadu, and others, each of whom brought forth various scriptures. Thus, from the Western Jin onward, the transmission and translation of scriptures gradually flourished.