3827 AM · 67 CE · world history
Buddhism reaches China
Buddhist monks reach China; the White Horse Monastery is founded at Luoyang.
Tradition says the Han emperor Ming dreamed of a golden man, and the envoys sent west brought back from India two monks with sutras on a white horse; for them the country's first monastery was built at Luoyang. Behind the legend stands a real process: along the caravan roads from Central Asia, preachers and translators move into China. The hardest part proves to be the language—the concepts of the foreign faith are rendered with Daoist words, and for the first centuries Buddhism is taken for a variety of the native teaching of the immortals. Later it will become one of the three pillars of Chinese culture.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the Chinese dynastic histories — the Han chronicles on the arrival of the monks and the translation of the sutras
Scholarship
- archaeology of China — the White Horse Monastery at Luoyang
Basis: documents and evidence.