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An Orphaned Merchant's Son Is Ordained on a Maritime Buddhist Crossroads

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An Orphaned Merchant's Son Is Ordained on a Maritime Buddhist Crossroads

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Khuong Tang Hoi, known in Chinese as Kang Senghui, was born in the early third century CE in Jiaozhi, the Chinese administered commandery covering what is now northern Vietnam, to a family of Sogdian merchant descent that had settled there, a documented ancestry distinct from a family native to the region for generations. Orphaned young, he was ordained a Buddhist monk in Jiaozhi itself, a documented ordination distinct from one carried out abroad.

Jiaozhi was, by his own time, already a well established center of Buddhist learning on the maritime trade route between India and China, a documented transmission path distinct from the overland Central Asian route through which Buddhism reached northern China. That an orphaned son of Sogdian merchants could be ordained into a fully formed Buddhist tradition without leaving his own commandery is documented as evidence of how developed Jiaozhi's own Buddhist learning already was.

That Khuong Tang Hoi's ordination took place entirely within Jiaozhi, a maritime crossroads where Buddhism had already taken root by a route distinct from the overland path into northern China, marks his early formation as a documented case where a future missionary's training required no journey beyond the trade port where he was orphaned and raised.

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Source New World EncyclopediaNew World Encyclopedia contributors
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New World Encyclopedia
New World Encyclopedia contributors, New World Encyclopedia (originally managed under contract by Paragon House Publishers for UPF/IIFWP; self-funded by advertising and donations since 2009), 2026View the Source
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