The merchants made use of the Buddhist monasteries as banks and warehouses.  Thus they, too, were well inclined towards Buddhism and gave money and land for its temples.  The temples were able to settle peasants on this land as their tenants.  In those times a temple was a more reliable landlord than an individual alien, and the poorer peasants readily became temple tenants; this increased their inclination towards Buddhism.

The Indian, Sogdian, and Turkestani monks were readily allowed to settle by the alien rulers of China, who had no national prejudice against other aliens.  The monks were educated men and brought some useful knowledge from abroad.  Educated Chinese were scarcely to be found, for the gentry retired to their estates, which they protected as well as they could from their alien ruler.  So long as the gentry had no prospect of regaining control of the threads of political life that extended throughout China, they were not prepared to provide a class of officials and scholars for the anti-Confucian foreigners, who showed interest only in fighting and trading.  Thus educated persons were needed at the courts of the alien rulers, and Buddhists were therefore engaged.  These foreign Buddhists had all the important Buddhist writings translated into Chinese, and so made use of their influence at court for religious propaganda.  This does not mean that every text was translated from Indian languages; especially in the later period many works appeared which came not from India but from Sogdia or Turkestan, or had even been written in China by Sogdians or other natives of Turkestan, and were then translated into Chinese.  In Turkestan, Khotan in particular became a centre of Buddhist culture.  Buddhism was influenced by vestiges of indigenous cults, so that Khotan developed a special religious atmosphere of its own; deities were honoured there (for instance, the king of Heaven of the northerners) to whom little regard was paid elsewhere.  This “Khotan Buddhism” had special influence on the Buddhist Turkish peoples.

Big translation bureaux were set up for the preparation of these translations into Chinese, in which many copyists simultaneously took down from dictation a translation made by a “master” with the aid of a few native helpers.  The translations were not literal, but were paraphrases, most of them greatly reduced in length, glosses were introduced when the translator thought fit for political or doctrinal reasons, or when he thought that in this way he could better adapt the texts to Chinese feeling.

Buddhism, quite apart from the special case of “Khotan Buddhism”, underwent extensive modification on its way across Central Asia.  Its main Indian form (Hinayana) was a purely individualistic religion of salvation without a God—­related in this respect to genuine Taoism—­and based on a concept of two classes of people:  the monks who could achieve salvation and, secondly, the masses who fed the monks but could not achieve salvation.