Lokaksema (Buddhist monk)

Lokaksema
Lokaksema (Chinese: 支谶; pinyin: Zhī Chèn).
Born	147 CE
Died	unknown
Occupation	Buddhist monk, scholar, translator, and missionary

Lokakṣema (Chinese: 支婁迦讖; pinyin: Zhī Lóujiāchèn, sometimes abbreviated Zhīchèn Chinese: 支讖), born around 147 CE, was the earliest known Buddhist monk to have translated Mahayana sutras into Chinese, and as such, is an important figure in Chinese Buddhism. The name Lokakṣema means "welfare of the world" in Sanskrit.

Lokaksema was a Kushan of Yuezhi ethnicity from Gandhara. (See Greco-Buddhism.) His ethnicity is described in his adopted Chinese name by the prefix Zhi (Chinese: 支), an abbreviation of Yuezhi (Chinese: 月支). As a Kushan Yuezhi, his native tongue might have been the official Kushan language, Bactrian, Prakrit, one of the , or even Persian or Greek. All of these are Indo-European languages and were spoken by the peoples of the Kushan Empire during his era.

Lokaksema was born in Gandhara, a center of Greco-Buddhist art, at a time when Buddhism was actively sponsored by the king, Kanishka the Great, who convened the Fourth Buddhist council. The proceedings of this council actually oversaw the formal split of Nikaya and Mahayana Buddhism. It would seem that Kanishka was not ill-disposed towards Mahayana Buddhism, opening the way for missionary activities in China by monks such as Lokakṣema.