e found, for
the gentry retired to their estates, which they protected as well as
they could from their alien ruler. So long as the gentry had no prospect
of regaining control of the threads of political life that extended
throughout China, they were not prepared to provide a class of officials
and scholars for the anti-Confucian foreigners, who showed interest only
in fighting and trading. Thus educated persons were needed at the courts
of the alien rulers, and Buddhists were therefore engaged. These foreign
Buddhists had all the important Buddhist writings translated into
Chinese, and so made use of their influence at court for religious
propaganda. This does not mean that every text was translated from
Indian languages; especially in the later period many works appeared
which came not from India but from Sogdia or Turkestan, or had even been
written in China by Sogdians or other natives of Turkestan, and were
then translated into Chinese. In Turkestan, Khotan in particular became
a centre of Buddhist culture. Buddhism was influenced by vestiges of
indigenous cults, so that Khotan developed a special religious
atmosphere of its own; deities were honoured there (for instance, the
king of Heaven of the northerners) to whom little regard was paid
elsewhere. This "Khotan Buddhism" had special influence on the Buddhist
Turkish peoples.

Big translation bureaux were set up for the preparation of these
translations into Chinese, in which many copyists simultaneously took
down from dictation a translation made by a "master" with the aid of a
few native helpers. The translations were not literal, but were
paraphrases, most of them greatly reduced in length, glosses were
introduced when the translator thought fit for political or doctrinal
reasons, or when he thought that in this way he could better adapt the
texts to Chinese feeling.

Buddhism, quite apart from the special case of "Khotan Buddhism",
underwent extensive modification on its way across Central Asia. Its
main Indian form (Hinayana) was a purely individualistic religion of
salvation without a God--related in this respect to genuine Taoism--and
based on a concept of two classes of people: the monks who could achieve
salvation and, secondly, the masses who fed the monks but could not
achieve salvation. This religion did not gain a footing in China; only
traces of it can be found in some Buddhistic sects in China. Mahayana
Buddhism, on the other hand, developed into