This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Kumarajiva is remembered in China as the founder there of the Sanlun, or Three Treatise, school, a documented institutional legacy distinct from his own personal record as a translator, built entirely on the Madhyamika texts his translation bureau rendered into Chinese. He had himself converted from Hinayana to Madhyamika teaching at twenty, a documented turn in his own study that preceded, by decades, the school later Chinese Buddhists would trace back to the texts his own conversion had led him to translate.
That a school could be founded in China on the strength of translated texts alone, without Kumarajiva himself ever organizing a monastic community or writing a rule the way a founder such as Pachomius had for Christian monasticism, is documented as the specific mechanism of the Sanlun school's origin: the translations came first, and the school assembled itself around them afterward rather than the reverse. His own scholarly formation across Kucha, Kashmir and Kashgar fed directly into the Madhyamika content those translations carried into China.
That a monk's own early conversion to Madhyamika teaching, carried forward decades later through the translations his bureau produced in Chang'an, became the founding basis of an entire Chinese Buddhist school marks the Sanlun school's origin as a documented case where a translator's personal doctrinal turn, rather than any act of institutional founding, gave a new tradition its start.