An Shigao

• 1. Introduction

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  An Shigao arrived in Luoyang in 148 CE carrying something the Han capital had never seen: Buddhist texts in a language the Chinese could not read. He would spend the next decades rendering those texts into Chinese, becoming the earliest known translator of Indian Buddhist scripture into that language. Who was this man? Where did he really come from? And why did he give up everything to cross half a continent for a religion he had adopted far from its birthplace? The answers, it turns out, are far more tangled than the legends suggest.

• 2. A Prince of Parthia

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  Legend describes An Shigao as a Parthian prince who walked away from his claim to the royal throne in order to become a Buddhist missionary monk. The story gave him a dramatic origin and a title: the "Parthian Marquess". But historians have never been able to match him to any Parthian prince named in sources from outside China.

  The prefix An in his name offered the first clue scholars pulled at. In Chinese convention, visitors from the regions of the Parthian Empire typically received the An prefix as a shorthand for Anxi, which was China's name for Parthian-controlled territory. That much is consistent. Beyond it, the specifics collapse.

  One hypothesis holds that An Shigao may have come from a small royal family on the eastern fringe of the empire, perhaps Margiana, where proximity to Buddhist communities made conversion plausible. Another theory links him to Gondophares, founder of the Indo-Parthian kingdom. Scholars pushing back on that alternative note that the An prefix might not have been applied to someone of Indo-Parthian descent, which makes the argument difficult to sustain.

  The academic work of Antonino Forte found traces of An Shigao's afterlife in the historical record: several individuals living in China between the 4th and 8th centuries, of Iranian descent, claimed ancestry from a figure called An Shigao. That cluster of claims tells us his name carried weight long after his death, even if his biography remained murky.

• 3. Luoyang and the Translations

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  Luoyang, the Han capital, was where An Shigao planted himself and began work. He settled there in 148 CE and attracted a devoted community of followers, building the kind of small network that made sustained translation possible.

  The range of texts he took on was wide. His surviving corpus covers meditation practice, abhidharma, and foundational Buddhist doctrines. One striking fact about his body of work: it contains no Mahayana scriptures. Yet early Chinese sources regularly refer to him as a bodhisattva, a term associated with the Mahayana tradition. Scholarly analysis of the translations themselves has placed them closest to the Sarvastivada school, one of the early non-Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Whether he was a monk or a layperson remains unknown, and whether his allegiance fell to the Sarvastivada or the Mahayana is still unresolved, though scholars note the two affiliations need not have been mutually exclusive.

• 4. Sorting the Authentic from the Attributed

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  Erik Zurcher's foundational research on the works attributed to An Shigao confronted an uncomfortable fact: later Chinese catalogues had assigned him nearly two hundred translations. Using stylistic evidence and the information those catalogues themselves provided, Zurcher concluded that only sixteen of those translations could be considered authentic.

  Stefano Zacchetti refined the count further. Drawing on more recent research, Zacchetti proposed that thirteen of Zurcher's sixteen texts could be reliably ascribed to An Shigao. That list carries Taisho catalogue numbers ranging from T 13 to T 1508, and includes texts on the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, mindfulness, and the analysis of mental factors.

  Three texts from Zurcher's list, including the Da anban shouyi jing (T 602), were flagged by Zacchetti as requiring reconsideration. Zacchetti also proposed, in a separate argument, that Taisho 1557, the Apitan wu fa xing jing, which Zurcher's conservative criteria had initially ruled out, may actually be An Shigao's work.

  Paul Harrison added another candidate from an unexpected direction. Harrison presented evidence that An Shigao translated a collection of samyuktAgama sutras, the Za ahan jing (Taisho 101), which had previously been listed as anonymous. If Harrison's evidence holds, An Shigao's authentic contribution grows considerably beyond the thirteen texts Zacchetti identified.

• 5. New Manuscripts from Osaka

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  In 1999, a researcher named Kajiura Susumu made a discovery in the Kongoji temple collection in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Two manuscripts surfaced there containing four texts that had not previously been known to exist.

  Based on their apparent antiquity, scholars have proposed that these texts may be attributable to An Shigao. Three of the four deal with meditation practices, including anapanasmrti, the technique known as mindfulness of breathing, and a set of practices organized around what the texts call the "twelve gates". The fourth is a different kind of document: a record of an oral commentary on the topics the other three texts addressed.

  That fourth text is notable because it suggests An Shigao may have been teaching as well as translating, working through the ideas with an audience rather than simply producing written versions of Indian sources. The Kongoji finds remain under active study, and the question of attribution has not been settled definitively.

• 6. A Disciple Carries the Work Forward

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  An Xuan, another translator from Anxi, worked in Luoyang as An Shigao's disciple. Unlike his teacher, An Xuan was a layman, not a monk or a figure of princely legend.

  Around 181 CE, An Xuan collaborated with a Chinese scholar named Yan Fotiao to produce a translation of a Mahayana scripture, the Ugrapariprccha Sutra, known in Chinese as the Fajing jing (Taisho 322). The fact that An Shigao's own disciple produced a Mahayana translation deepens the puzzle surrounding the teacher. An Shigao's corpus avoided Mahayana texts entirely, yet his circle evidently included people drawn to that tradition. The Fajing jing stands as evidence that the translation community An Shigao built in Luoyang was broader than any single doctrinal allegiance.