A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations

Jan Nattier is a scholar of early Buddhist textual history, and this book, published through the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University, is her academic study revising the traditional attributions given to the earliest Chinese translations of Buddhist scripture, questioning which texts were actually translated by the figures long credited with them. Its strength is rigorous textual and linguistic analysis applied to attribution questions that earlier scholarship, and the Buddhist tradition itself, had often taken on faith, work that includes her separately influential argument that the Heart Sutra was likely composed in China rather than translated from an Indian original. Its limit is that publisher confirmation for this specific edition could not be verified independently, a gap the source record itself already notes, though Nattier's scholarly standing and the work's citation in the field are not in question.