ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the millennium-long enterprise of the translation of Indian Buddhist texts into Chinese, beginning from the mid-second century CE. I examine the oral-aural translation procedures of the first committees and demonstrate that this process led to confusions that found their way into the finished products. I also look at the first native attempts to conceptualize translation in relation to China’s first encounter with a significant literary other. The ruling elite often took an active role in Buddhist translation, and I look at two prominent cases. Pre-modern Buddhist translation effectively comes to a close during the eleventh century. All of these efforts to make sense of a literary and religious other for the first time in pre-modern China demonstrate that translation is a fertile site of cultural confluence, negotiation, and appropriation.
