The principal Tang-period Chinese Nestorian Christian writer-translator of the late 8th century. Chinese clerical name Jǐngjìng 景淨; Syriac name Adam (also given as Aluoben Adam in some sources). Lifedates not preserved (active ca. 740s–790s).
He served as a senior Nestorian śramaṇa (using the Buddhist-canonical terminology shā-mén 沙門) at the Dà-Qín-sì 大秦寺 — the Nestorian Christian temple in Cháng-ān established under the patronage of the Tang imperial court. His position would correspond approximately to that of a senior priest or bishop in the Eastern Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy.
His principal known work is the DàQín jǐngjiào liúxíng zhōngguó bēisòng 大秦景教流行中國碑頌 (KR6s0083, T2144) — the inscription on the Nestorian Stele erected on 4 February 781 CE at the DàQínsì in Chángān, under the patronage of the Persian-Syriac Christian imperial advisor Yīsī 伊斯 (= Yazdbozid). The inscription is the single most important document of pre-modern Chinese Christianity and one of the foundational documents of modern Sinology after its 1625 rediscovery.
Jǐng-jìng was also the principal Tang Nestorian translator-into-Chinese of his generation, responsible for substantial translation activity at the Dà-Qín-sì translation bureau. The famous Tang Buddhist scholar-monk Yuán-zhào 圓照 records (in his Zhēn-yuán xīn-dìng shì-jiào mù-lù 貞元新定釋教目錄, T2157) that Jǐng-jìng collaborated with the Buddhist Prajñā 般若 (the Kashmiri translator of the Mahāyāna texts) on a joint translation project — a striking documentary witness to Tang-period interreligious translation cooperation, though the project was apparently not completed (the Tang shang-shu presumably stopped it after Buddhist objections to mixing Christian and Buddhist canonical material).
Jǐngjìng’s authorship of the Tang-period Chinese Christian “Sutra-of-Honoring-the-True-Sage” (尊經) and other liturgical texts (preserved in fragmentary form at Pelliot Chinese 3847 and elsewhere) is also conventionally accepted, though the attribution is less certain than for the Stele inscription.
Source: byline of DàQín jǐngjiào liúxíng zhōngguó bēisòng (KR6s0083, T54n2144); Yuánzhào’s Zhēnyuán xīndìng shìjiào mùlù (T2157); R. Todd Godwin, Persian Christians at the Chinese Court (2018); A. C. Moule and P. Y. Saeki’s classic studies.