Dominant factions in the monasteries.
The eyes of the medieval Chinese who for hundreds of years were recipients of what must have seemed an endless stream of Buddhist texts and teaching flowing out of India.
It no doubt appeared utterly overwhelming. Their knowledge dealt with a wide range of topics from a variety of standpoints that were often in conflict with each other. The problem was threefold. First, the texts had to be translated from periodic languages, radically different in structure and style from Chinese. Second, once translated the great number and variety of Buddhist scriptures made available in Chinese could be read only by the literal few, an ambiguities in the teachings. China’s Confucian traditions had long elevated the role of the scholar as interpreter of difficult and arcane knowledge. This the obvious solution to this threefold problem was to create and fund research complexes with certain of the elite monasteries in which highly trained scholar monks could translate, study and interpret these scriptures. Many of the monks who devoted much of their lives to work within these institutes rose to the highest status within the Chinese Buddhist establishment. Their output was prodigious and highly regarded in elite society. These monks were one of the dominant factions in the monasteries of changan.