For almost nine hundred years, from the end of the Han to that of the Han to that of the Northern Sung, every dynasty had its i-ch'ang (譯場) or translation centre which was composed of Buddhist monks and lay devotees and where Buddhist Sutras in Sanskrit from India were translated into Chinese.Although students of Buddhism all know that these translation centres existed, no treatise has ever been written on the methods of translation and the allocation of work among the translators. The author has made studies of this subject from the prefaces of extant Sutras in Chinese, monks'biographies written by fellow-monks, and bibliographies of Buddhist literature. As a result the author has found that before the Sui dynasty the so-called translation centre was actually a Buddhist congress which was often attended by as many as three thousand people and that there no strict division of lab our in the work of translation. Translation centres after Sui-T'ang times, however, were seminars which consisted of chosen expert translators, usually no more than about twenty. Not only was the work finely divided, but the standard of efficiency was also very high. Although the translation of Tibetan Sutras during the Yuan and the Ch'ing Dynasties was not done at any translation centre, the subject is never the less discussed in this article.
