Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism

Sūtrālaṅkāra – 174
Like all the Buddhists, in the first place he adores the Three Jewels,
viz., the Buddha, the Law and the Community. Next he addresses his
homage to the assembly of the Sa-po-che-po, which is the
transcription in Chinese symbols of the Hindu term Sarvāstivādi,
which means “those who believe in the existence of everything.”
This transcription differs somewhat from the more usual and more
correct one. But we have to remember that the monk who translated
the original Sanskrit into the Chinese, Kumārajīva, was an
inhabitant of Karashar, in Chinese Turkestan, and that he had never
been to India so that his Sanskrit pronunciation was naturally not of
the best. Sylvain Lévi carefully explains the process by which the
Indian, Central Asian and Chinese Buddhists evolved a system of
transliteration of Hindu names in the terms of the Chinese symbols.
The Sarvāstivādi school was one of the most prosperous in the world
of Buddhism. It was a powerful throughout India, but the Chinese
pilgrims found it equally flourishing in Central Asia and in the
Indian Archipelago. The Vinaya, or the disciplinary code of this
school, which is generally known as the Vinaya of the Ten
Recitations, was translated into Chinese as early as 404. The
translator was just our Kumārajīva who had a collaborator in
Puṇyatara. We may note in passing, that another branch of the same
school, which was called the primæval Sarvāstivādis, Arya-mūla-
Sarvāstivādis, possessed an enormous Vinaya in Sanskrit, which was
translated into Chinese under the direction of the famous I-tsing
between 703 and 710 and a century later into Tibetan. It is a
noteworthy coincidence in the history of Buddhistic researchers, that
Edouard Huber and Sylvan Lévi, both French scholars, at one [203]
and the same time, working independently, discovered fragments of
this Vinaya in their original form in the Sanskrit Divyāvadāna.