A name appearing in the byline of the Tang-imperial Manichaean compendium Móní guāngfó jiàofǎ yí luè (KR6s0079, T2141A), translated and presented at the Jíxiányuàn 集賢院 (Tang imperial Academy of Assembled Worthies) on 18 July 731 CE at the imperial command of Xuánzōng 玄宗.
The name “Fúduōdàn 拂多誕”, as reconstructed by Lín Wùshū 林悟殊 (Móníjiào jí qí dōngjiàn, 1987 / 1997) and other modern Manichaean scholars, is not a personal name but a Chinese transliteration of the Manichaean ecclesiastical title — variously reconstructed as Middle-Persian frat’ist / fudai / Manichaean Sogdian mahistāg (= praeses) — which designates the rank of presbyter-bishop in the five-rank Manichaean ecclesiastical hierarchy (Hearer / audītor, Elect / electus, Presbyter / presbyter, Bishop / episcopus, Apostle / apostolus). The actual personal name of the Manichaean clergyman who undertook the imperial translation is not preserved.
He was almost certainly a Manichaean clergyman dispatched from the Western Regions (likely from the Sogdian-speaking communities of Trans-Oxiana that were the principal eastern Manichaean institutional base in this period) to the Tang court for the formal imperial reception of the Manichaean church. His translation work at the Jíxiányuàn is among the most remarkable cases of imperial-court non-Buddhist non-Daoist non-Confucian religious-canonical translation in pre-modern Chinese history — making him a major (though anonymous-by-personal-name) figure in the cross-cultural religious history of medieval Eurasia.
Source: byline of Móní guāngfó jiàofǎ yí luè (T54n2141A); Lín Wùshū 林悟殊, Móníjiào jí qí dōngjiàn (Zhōnghuá Shūjú, 1987); Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (Mohr Siebeck, 1992).