Zhi Qian

Who is Zhi Qian?

Zhi Qian was a Chinese Buddhist layman of Yuezhi ancestry who translated a wide range of Indian Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. He was the grandson of an immigrant from the country of the Great Yuezhi, an area that overlapped to at least some extent with the territory of the Kushan Empire. According to the Chinese custom of the time, he used the ethnicon "Zhi" as his surname, to indicate his foreign ancestry.

Born in north China, at an early age Zhi Qian became a disciple of Zhi Liang, who in turn had been a disciple of the famous translator of Mahāyāna scriptures, Lokakṣema, who was likewise of Yuezhi ancestry. Toward the end of the Han Dynasty, as chaos spread throughout the north, Zhi Qian migrated with several dozens of his countrymen to the southern Wu kingdom. Settling first at Wuchang, then in Jianye after 229 CE. According to the earliest extant biography, contained in Sengyou's Chu sanzang ji ji, completed c. 518 CE, the Wu ruler, Sun Quan was so impressed with Zhi Qian's abilities that he appointed him tutor to the crown prince.

Though it seems likely that Zhi Qian had already begun translating Buddhist texts while in the northern capital of Luoyang, the bulk of his translation activity was carried out in the south. His translations—of which more than two dozen are extant today—span a wide range of genres and include both Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna scriptures. Among them are a number of āgama texts, didactic verses, a biography of the Buddha, and several Mahāyāna sūtras, of which some of the most famous are the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha, the Shorter Perfection of Wisdom scripture, and an early version of what subsequently became the Buddhāvataṃsaka.