Part Two · The Earliest Chinese Translations · Recollection Speaks Chinese for the First Time

The Dharma's coming east was not the work of a single night. It came along the trade roads, stage by stage, carried by camel caravans and by generation after generation of translator monks, across the vast sand wastes and into China.

And the earliest Chinese Buddhist scriptures we can still read today preserve one very telling trace: in those days, the word niànfó — "recollect the Buddha" — had not yet been coined.

Part Two has a single chapter, on a single scripture — the Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections. By tradition, it is the first Buddhist text ever translated in China. We read it to see one thing clearly: when the Indian practice of recollection first landed in the Chinese language, the word it borrowed first was not "Buddha," a word still strange to Chinese ears, but another word the Chinese had long known — dào, "the path."

When recollection first opened its mouth and spoke Chinese, what it said was niàndào — recollecting the path.

In this chapter, we listen to its earliest voice.