Kumarajiva (344-413 AD) is a giant in the history of Chinese culture. He is a well-known thinker, Buddhist scholar, philosopher and translator. He translated 35 classics, 294 volumes, including The Great Prajna Sutra, The Essay Prajna Sutra, Saddharmapundarika-sutra(The Lotus Sutra) , and The Diamond Sutra . Without violating the fundamental principles of Buddhism, Kumarajiva is good at using Chinese words, so that his sutra translation are brilliant and vivid. Being elegant and profound, it is an indispensable part of Chinese literature which creates a new realm for Chinese culture. The Silk Road Walker-Kumarajiva is an animated feature film that uses Kumarajiva's life experience as a clue to outline the history of the magnificent and expansive Silk Road (Qiuci-Liangzhou-Chang’an), showing Kumarajiva’s unique personality charm and indomitable spirit. The art style of the animation is based on the Kizil Grottoes style and color language which have been thoroughly studied and analyzed. At the same time, the chief creators also studied important historical documents such as the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Dunhuang frescoes, and extracted common characteristics and special features from them. After converting the contemporary cultural phenomena to modern modeling languages, they applied them to the creation of animation works.
The Silk Road Walker-Kumarajiva project won the Animation Project of Zhejiang Provincial Cultural Excellence Project in 2017. This project is led by the Visual China Collaborative Innovation Center of China Academy of Art and is jointly created by the School of Film and Animation and the Rock Painting Research Institute. It intends to give full play to the artistic advantages of the School of Fine Arts and integrate the disciplines of fine arts and drama and film. The joint creation takes full advantage of the two disciplines to show the magnificent and legendary life story of the cultural giant Kumarajiva in the form of multimedia animation art, in order to convey the profound, detailed and subtle aesthetic charm of Chinese cultural thoughts, highlight the oriental artistic conception, and strengthen the unique aesthetic characteristics of the Chinese national culture. After going to India, Qiuci, Dunhuang, Xinjiang and other places for investigation and researching, collating, sorting out and compiling the biographies of the main character " Kumarajiva ", the project creators began to concentrate on creating The Silk Road Walker-Kumarajiva in September 2017 and finally completed it, a nearly 20-minute animation, at the end of 2019. In 2019, the film was selected into "The Great Tide" of the 14th Art Exhibition of Zhejiang Province and the 13th National Art Exhibition – To Celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People's Republic of China.