rkestani monks were readily allowed to settle
by the alien rulers of China, who had no national prejudice against
other aliens. The monks were educated men and brought some useful
knowledge from abroad. Educated Chinese were scarcely to be 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