Via the Silk Road, Buddhism was brought over land to China. The Silk Road transmission of Buddhism is most commonly thought to have started in the late 2nd or the 1st century CE.
The first documented translation efforts by Buddhist monks in China (all foreigners) were in the 2nd century CE, possibly as a consequence of the expansion of the Kushan Empire into the Chinese territory of the Tarim Basin.
From the 4th century onward, with Faxian's pilgrimage to India (395–414), and later Xuanzang (629–644), Chinese pilgrims too started to travel by themselves to northern India, their source of Buddhism, in order to get improved access to original scriptures. The Silk Road transmission of Buddhism began to decline around the 7th century with the rise of Islam in Central Asia.
Read more about Silk Road Transmission Of Buddhism: Artistic Influences, Buddhism in The Book of Later Han, Buddhism in Apocryphal Traditions
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