At the emperor's instance, Hiuen-tsang now corrected the translation of the celebrated Sutra Kin-kang-pat-nia-pa-la-mi-ta-king (in Sanscrit, Vajra-chedika-prajna-para-mita Sutra). Two words were added to the title which Kumarajiva had omitted. The new title read Neng-twan-kin, etc. The name of the city Shravasti was spelt with five characters instead of two. The new translation of this work did not supplant the old one--that of Kumarajiva. The latter is at the present day the most common, except the "Daily Prayers," of all books in the Buddhist temples and monasteries, and is in the hands of almost every monk.

This work contains the germ of the larger compilation Prajna paramita in one hundred and twenty volumes. The abstractions of Buddhist philosophy, which were afterwards ramified to such a formidable extent as these numbers indicate, are here found in their primary form probably, as they were taught by Shakyamuni himself. The translation of the larger work was not completed till A.D.

[paragraph continues] 661. That Hiuen-tsang, as a translator, was a strong literalist, may be inferred from the fact, that when he was meditating on the propriety of imitating Kumarajiva, who omitted repetitions and superfluities, in so large a work as this, he was deterred by a dream from the idea, and resolved to give the one hundred and twenty volumes entire, in all their wearisome reiteration of metaphysical paradoxes.

Among the new orthographies that he introduced was that of Bi-ch'u for Bi-k'u, "Mendicant disciple," and of Ba-ga-vam instead of But for "Buddha." This spelling nearly coincides with that of the Nepaulese Sanscrit, Bhagavat. In the Pali versions he is called "Gautama," which is a patronymic, in Chinese, Go-dam. Ba-ga-vam is used in the Sutra Yo-si-lieu-li-kwang-ju-lai-kung-te-king. Modern reprints of Hiuen-tsang's translation of the Shastras called Abhidharma, are found in a fragmentary and worm-eaten state in many of the larger Buddhist temples near Shanghai and elsewhere at the present time. He lived nineteen years after his return, and spent nearly the whole of that time in translating. He completed 740 works, in 1335 books. Among them were three works on Logic, viz., Li-men-lun, In-ming-lun, In-ming-shu-kiai. Among other works that he brought to China, were treatises on Grammar, Shing-ming-lun and Pe-ye-kie-la-nan, and a Lexicon, Abhidharma Kosha.