The translation of Buddhist scriptures from ancient India into Chinese involved more than the transmission of religious doctrine. It also required the negotiation of fundamentally different systems of quantification, valuation, and material understanding. Taking the expression jia zhi bai qian liang jin 價直百千兩金 (“worth one hundred thousand taels of gold”) in the Dunhuang manuscript Qiyan lu 啟顏錄 as its point of departure, this article examines how Sanskrit numerical and value expressions were reconstructed in Chinese Buddhist translation. It asks how the Sanskrit expression śata-sahasra/śatasahasramūlyaṃ was rendered in Chinese, why translators adopted the calque baiqian 百千 rather than the more idiomatic native term shiwan 十萬, and why the Chinese expression further introduced the weight unit liang 兩 (tael) and the material term jin 金 (gold). Drawing on Sanskrit-Chinese comparison, historical-linguistic analysis, and the comparative history of monetary and metrological systems in India and China, the study argues that Chinese Buddhist translators frequently preserved the internal morphology of the Sanskrit original through the literal form baiqian, while also localizing the expression by adding liang jin 兩金 in order to make a counting-based notion of value intelligible within Chinese habits of weighing precious metal. The Qiyan lu anecdote further shows how this translational formula could be received and reinterpreted in a vernacular setting.
Duoyi Xu (Fri,) studied this question.