Since very early times in China, writing had been understood as intimately tied to spiritual, political and cultural authority (Lewis 1999)—an association manifest in the Chinese term for culture (wenhua, 文化), which combines characters for literature (文) and transformation (化). The arrival of Buddhist texts were evidence that there were peoples in “the West” who, unlike any other peoples the Chinese had encountered, not only had their own customs, but also their own literary culture and thus their own claims to authority. Buddhist texts held out the promise of alternative ways of understanding the world and the place of humanity in it, but also new forms of subjectivity and imagination, new personal ideals, and new visions of the interrelatedness of the spiritual and the political.