Lokaká¹£ema (à ¤²à ¥Âà ¤Âà ¤Âà ¥Âà ¤·à ¥Âà ¤®, ) (flourished 147âÂÂ189) was a Kushan Buddhist monk who travelled to China during the Han dynasty and is one of the first known translators of Mahayana religious texts into any language.
Details of Lokaká¹£ema's life come to us via a short biography by Sengyou (å§ç¥Â; pinyin: SÃÂngyòu; 445âÂÂ518 CE) and his text "Collected Records concerning the Tripitaka" (åºä¸ÂèÂÂè¨Âé Chu sanzang jìjÃÂ, T2145).
The name å©Â迦讠is usually rendered in Sanskrit as Lokaká¹£ema, though this is disputed by some scholars, and variants such as Lokaká¹£ama have been proposed. In particular the character è® can be read as chen or chan. Sengyou refers to him as Zhëchèn (). The Zhë () prefix added to his Chinese name suggests that Lokaksema was of Yuezhi () ethnicity. He is traditionally said to have been a Kushan, though the Chinese term Yuezhi covered a broad area of what is now Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Given his background, Lokaksema was very likely to have been multilingual and have had knowledge of various languages including Gandhari Prakrit which was used as the language of religion, administration, and commerce in the North Western parts of India. It is speculated however by the scholar, Paul Harrison, that his mother tongue was Bactrian.
Lokaksema arrived in the Han capital Luoyang toward the end of the reign of Emperor Huan of Han (r.147-168), and between 178 and 189 CE translated a number of MahayÃÂna Buddhist texts into Chinese.
Lokaksema's translation activities, as well as those of the Parthians An Shigao and An Xuan slightly earlier, or his fellow Yuezhi Dharmaraká¹£a (around 286 CE) illustrate the key role Central Asians had in propagating Buddhism to the countries of East Asia. With the decline and fall of the Han, the empire fell into chaos and Lokaká¹£ema disappeared from the historical record so we do not know the date of his death.
The editors of the Taishà  Tripiá¹Âaka attribute twelve texts to Lokaká¹£ema. These attributions have been studied in detail by Erik Zürcher, Paul Harrison, and Jan Nattier, and some have been called into question.
Zürcher considers it reasonably certain that Lokakṣema translated the following:
According to Nattier, Harrison "expresses reservations" concerning the Aká¹£ohhya-vyà «ha (T313), and considers that T418 is the product of revision and does not date from Lokaká¹£ema's time.
Conversely, Harrison considers that the following ought to be considered genuine:
A characteristic of Lokaká¹£ema's translation style was the extensive transliteration of Indic terms and his retention of India stylistic features such as long sentences. He typically rendered Indic verse as Chinese prose, making no attempt to capture the meter. Based on evidence from Chinese catalogues of texts, Nattier suggests that T224 and T418 are representative of Lokaká¹£ema and might stand as "core texts", i.e. as representative of his style of translating, although both show some signs of later editing. A second tier of textsâÂÂT280, T350, T458, and T807âÂÂall strongly resemble Lokaká¹£ema's core texts, though with occasional anomalies. T624 and T626 form a third tier with more deviations from the distinctive style of Lokaká¹£ema. If T313 was indeed a translation by Lokaká¹£ema, it has been extensively revised by an unknown editor, though the prose sections are closer to his style than the verse.
Several translations attributed to Lokaká¹£ema have been lost: