An Shigao
Second century Buddhist missionary to China
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Origins
The prefix An in An Shigao's name has raised many questions and hypotheses as to his origin and story. Some believe that it is an abbreviation of Anxi, the Chinese name given to the regions ruled by the Parthian Empire. Most visitors from that country who took a Chinese name received the An prefix to indicate their origin in Anxi.
Nothing more is known about his life; the stories about his peregrinations in Southern China recorded in his biographies in CSZJJ (Chu sanzang jiji) and GSZ (Gaoseng Zhuan) must be relegated to the realm of hagiography. An Shigao has never been successfully identified with any Parthian prince figuring in occidental sources.
It is still unknown whether he was a monk or layperson or whether he should be considered a follower of the Sarvāstivāda or Mahāyāna, though affiliation with these two groups need not be viewed as mutually exclusive. The unresolved mystery of who An Shigao was is studied in the academic work of Antonino Forte. Antonio Forte found in various secular sources that there were several individuals living in the 4th to 8th century China who were of Iranian descent and claimed ancestry from an individual called An Shigao. Given that the Parthian Empire was decentralised in structure, some theorise that he may have been a member of a small royal family that held power in the eastern end of the Empire like Margiana where it would have been plausible for them to come into contact with Buddhism. An alternative viewpoint exists which hypothesises that An Shigao was a descendant of Gondophares, the founder of the Indo-Parthian kingdom. However, the argument against this is that the An prefix may not have been applied if this was the case.
An Shigao migrated eastward into China, settling at the Han capital of Luoyang in 148 CE, where he produced a substantial number of translations of Indian Buddhist texts and attracted a devoted community of followers. More than a dozen works by An Shigao are currently extant, including texts dealing with meditation, abhidharma, and basic Buddhist doctrines. An Shigao's corpus does not contain any Mahāyāna scriptures, though he himself is regularly referred to as a "bodhisattva" in early Chinese sources. Scholarly studies of his translations have shown that they are most closely affiliated with the Sarvāstivāda school.