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| Dharmarakṣa | |||||||
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| Chinese name | |||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 竺法護 | ||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 竺法护 | ||||||
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| Korean name | |||||||
| Hangul | 축법호 | ||||||
| Hanja | 竺法護 | ||||||
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| Japanese name | |||||||
| Kanji | 竺法護 | ||||||
| Kana | じく ほうご | ||||||
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Dharmarakṣa (Chinese:竺法護;pinyin:Zhú Fǎhù; J. Jiku Hōgo; K. Ch'uk Pŏpho; c. 233-310) was one of the most important early translators ofMahayana sutras intoChinese. Several of his translations had profound effects onEast Asian Buddhism.[1] He is described in scriptural catalogues asYuezhi in origin.
His family lived atDunhuang, where he was born around 233 CE.[2] At the age of eight, he became a novice and took the Indian monk namedZhu Gaozuo (Chinese:竺高座) as his teacher.[3]
As a young boy, Dhamaraksa was said to be extremely intelligent, and journeyed with his teacher to many countries in the Western Regions, where he learnedCentral Asian languages and scripts. He then traveled back to China with a quantity of Buddhist texts and translated them with the aid of numerous assistants and associates, both Chinese and foreign, from Parthians to Khotanese.[4] One of his more prominent assistants was a Chinese upāsaka, Nie Chengyuan (Chinese:聶承遠), who served as a scribe and editor.[5]
Dharmaraksa first began his translation career inChang'an (present dayXi'an) in 266 CE, and later moved toLuoyang, the capital of the newly formedJin Dynasty.[6] He was active in Dunhuang for some time as well, and alternated between the three locations. It was in Chang'an that he made the first known translation of theLotus Sutra and theTen Stages Sutra, two texts that later became definitive forChinese Buddhism, in 286 and 302, respectively.[7] He died at the age of seventy-eight after a period of illness; the exact location of his death is still disputed.[8]
Altogether, Dharmaraksa translated around 154 sūtras. Many of his works were greatly successful, widely circulating around northern China in the third century and becoming the subject of exegetical studies and scrutiny by Chinese monastics in the fourth century.[9] His efforts in both translation and lecturing on sūtras are said to have converted many in China to Buddhism, and contributed to the development of Chang'an into a major center of Buddhism at the time.[10]
Some of his main translations are:[1][11]
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