Dilip ji, Interesting article. Thanks for posting it on Sajha. Being a student of Chinese and all things Chinese myself I liked your piece and thought of sharing my views. I hope you won't take it personally and we can start a nice debate on this interesting topic. Like you said, Chinese contains words from many languages, including Pali and Sanskrit. But also, like you said, the transliteration system makes those words Chinese and I am always amazed at the fact that they seem to find the perfect character for those new words and if you can read the character(s) and/or combination(s) you can easily guess the meaning. One inteseting fact that you didn't mention and which I think was worth mentioning is that that the guardian diety of Beijing is named Yamantak. You can find his temple right next to the Beihai Stupa in Beijing. And in the Buddhist monastaries you have the guards with the Sanksrit names Dhritarastra etc. protecting the dieties such as Samantavadra, Maitreya, Guanyin . The Chinese begin their prayings with the transliteration of Om Namo Amitabha. And you find the Buddhist/Sanskrit influence in one of the most popular Chinese Classics, The Journey to the West/ Xi You Ji in which Xuan Zang leads the monkey king and pig to India to learn the Buddhist sutras. Since this story takes place in the Tang dynasty, we can easily assert that the idea of learning Buddhism and coming up with new words and concepts such as Su Bo Dhi and Guan Yin, Ya Ma, Wan Shou Guan Yin existed well before then. The Chinese scholars then and until fairly later before the Song Neo Confucianism became the "policy" of the state in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing periods held India and its philosophy in high regard. One thing that is truly amazing is that the Chinese were not learning the Indian philosophy to compare it with their own and prove that their (Chinese) philosophy was superior the way the later day Japanese "nativist" scholars such as Hirata Atsutane and Motoori Norinaga were doing; they (the chinese) were doing it to incorporate the new ideas into Chinese philosophy. But the liberal tang dynasty which opned up China didn't last long and the later day rulers found it scary to have foreign ideas "influencing" the Chinese. Then the Chinese started to view things in the Barbarian/Civilized dialectic and China decided to close itself or save itself from the Bararians. China's impressive naval fleet led by Zheng He was ordered not to explore anymore and that isolation from foreigners and foreign ideas had serious consequences for the Chinese in later years. Ok just my views. Please feel free to disagree.