ABSTRACT
The monk Yan Cong 彥琮 came from a family surnamed Li 李, from a region that now belongsto Hebei Province. He was exceptionally intelligent and showed early promise as a scholar. Atthe age of fourteen, he went to a county in what is now Shanxi Province and preached Buddhistsutras. He began to gain a reputation, even among Taoists and Ruists. At the start of the Sui Dynasty(581–618 CE) in 581 CE, he lectured in Chang'an (now Xi'an), winning a very large andrespectful following among both lay people and monks, and tens of thousands benefited fromhis sermons. Yan Cong was well versed in Sanskrit, calling himself “the monk who knows Fàn(Sanskrit)”. Later he went to the capital and became the abbot of Great Xingshan Monastery大興善寺, where he took charge of the translation of sutras. He was involved in all the major Translation Assemblies in the Sui Dynasty, and contributed to the translation of twenty-threesutras, in over one hundred fascicles. Since he knew Sanskrit and had studied many of the canonical Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, his task in the Translation Assemblies was to check the Sanskrittexts and the meaning. He also translated from Chinese into Sanskrit, and was probably oneof the first Chinese monks to attain such an accomplishment. He wrote a well-known treatiseon translation, On the Right Way 辯正論 (Bian zheng lun), 218 the complete text of which is nolonger extant but parts of which have been recorded in the biography of Yan Cong collected in A Continuation of the Biographies of Eminent Monks 續高僧傳 (Xu gaoseng zhuan). 219 He diedat the age of fifty-four.
(Headnote prepared by Luo Xinzhang, translated by Jane Lai)
