Caotang Temple is a modest monastery in Huxian, in the plain south-west of Xi'an, and it holds a place in Chinese intellectual history out of proportion to its size. In the early fifth century a monk from the oasis city of Kucha, known in Chinese as Kumarajiva, was brought to Chang'an by the ruler of the Later Qin and set up a translation bureau here. Over roughly a decade his team rendered a large body of Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Chinese of such clarity and influence that the versions they produced are still the standard ones recited in Chinese-language temples today.
The translation work
Kumarajiva did not work alone. The bureau was a production line of scholars, scribes and editors who took the original texts, settled the Chinese terminology, and produced versions designed to be read aloud and understood rather than translated word for word. The vocabulary they fixed - terms such as the words now used for wisdom, compassion, emptiness and enlightenment - entered Chinese and then Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, and the doctrinal schools that grew from their texts shaped East Asian Buddhism for the next fifteen hundred years. That a large part of this happened in a rural temple outside Chang'an is one of the oddities of the period.
The temple today
The temple stands among fields, with a gate, courtyards and halls of Qing and modern date, and it is a quiet place with few visitors outside festival days. Its centrepiece is a small stone reliquary pagoda, a carved box-like tower of grey stone said to hold Kumarajiva's relics, which is one of the oldest pieces of Buddhist stonework in the province. There is also a pond that produces a plume of mist in the right weather, long associated with the site and giving the temple a local nickname, and a hall of steles and memorial tablets, including modern inscriptions in Japanese from pilgrims tracing their own tradition back to the translation work done here.
Practical notes
Caotang Temple is about an hour and a half by road from central Xi'an, in Huxian, and is usually visited as part of a day that includes the Chongyang Palace and the peasant-painting workshops of the same district, or on the way to the Qinling foothills. It charges a modest admission and is open daily. Because there is almost nothing commercial around it, plan the visit as a stop rather than an outing: an hour is enough, two if you want to sit in the courtyards, and there is nowhere nearby to eat except in the county town.
