Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什 (Skt. Kumārajīva “Eternal-Youth-of-Life”; Chinese gloss 童壽 “Youth-Long-Life”; DILA Authority A001583; 344–413) was the most influential of all the foreign-born translators in the history of Chinese Buddhism. The biographical sources are the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145, 100b–102a) and the Gāosēng zhuàn 高僧傳 (T2059, 330a–333a). He was the son of the Brahmin Kumārāyana 鳩摩羅炎 (a former minister at the Kuchean court who had become a monk) and the Kuchean princess Jīvā 耆婆; he was born in Kucha 龜茲國 on the central Silk Road and was ordained as a śrāmaṇera at the age of seven. His mother subsequently took him to Kashmir and to Kāśgar for advanced study with the great Sarvāstivāda master Bandhudatta 槃頭達多, where he received his foundational Abhidharma training; he later converted to the Mahāyāna under the influence of Sūryasoma at Kāśgar.
He returned to Kucha and became its most celebrated Buddhist scholar; his fame reached as far as the FúQín 苻秦 capital of Cháng’ān, and in 384 the warlord Lǚ Guāng 呂光, sent by Fú Jiān 苻堅 to bring him east, captured Kucha and abducted Kumārajīva. The political collapse of the FúQín left Kumārajīva detained in Liángzhōu under Lǚ Guāng’s successor state for sixteen years (384–401), during which he learned literary Chinese and acquainted himself with Chinese poetry and prose; he was finally received at Cháng’ān by Yáo Xìng 姚興 of the YáoQín 後秦 in Hóngshǐ 弘始 3 (401 CE) and there established the most important translation bureau of pre-Táng Chinese Buddhism.
In the twelve years before his death (401–413) he translated, with a team of more than 800 monks and scholars (including Sēngzhào, Daosheng 道生, and Sēngruì 僧叡), some 35 works in 294 fascicles. His Mahāyāna corpus — the Maha-prajñāpāramitā-śāstra (T1509, the Dà zhì-dù lùn), the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka (T262, the Lotus), the Vajracchedikā (T235), the Vimalakīrti (T475), the Sukhāvatī-vyūha (T366), the four texts of the Madhyamaka school (Mūla-Madhyamaka-kārikā T1564, Dvādaśa-mukha-śāstra T1568, Śata-śāstra T1569, Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra T1509) — was the foundation of the entire later development of East Asian Mahāyāna. He also produced significant Āgama and Vinaya translations, including the [[KR6a0035|Hǎi-bā-dé jīng 海八德經]] (T35) and the Sarvāstivāda Pratimokṣa (T1436). He died at Cháng’ān on 29 May 413 CE, aged 70, leaving (according to the famous closing line of his testament) his tongue uncombusted by the cremation-fire as evidence of the truth of his translations.