Interfaith

Jenkins again: “in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought with him into either Chinese or any other familiar tongue . . . . He duly consulted the bishop named Adam . . . . Adam had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese, and the two probably shared a knowledge of Persian.  Together, Budhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom . . . . Scholars still speculated whether Adam infiltrated Christian concepts into the translated sutras, consciously or otherwise.”

Adam’s work had a significant impact on Japanese Buddhism.  Japanese monks took these translations back home with them and “these works became the founding texts of the two great Buddhist schools – respectively, Shingon and Tendai; and all the famous Buddhist movements of later Japanese history, including Zen and Pure Land, can be traced to one of these two schools.”