 Commerce also played a strong role, but this will be discussed later.It was foreigners that began the process of translation into Chinese (“…the early impetus for the translation of Buddhist texts into Sinitic came primarily from foreign monks resident in China.”)(714-715, 717) What Mair calls “literary Sinitic” is an extremely difficult language to learn, “…requiring at least ten to fifteen years to gain a modicum of proficiency.”(716) These foreign translators were adults when they came to China and most likely learned spoken Chinese through immersion in the culture before learning how to write the language.When it came time to write, they used the language they knew which was the vernacular.