Jan Nattier did her undergraduate work in comparative religion (specializing in Buddhism) at Indiana University, where she also began graduate training in modern and classical Mongolian, Old Uighur, and classical Tibetan in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University under the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies in 1988 with a dissertation in the field of classical Mongolian. After completing her doctorate her interests gradually shifted toward the transmission of Buddhism from India to China through Central Asia, and ultimately to the history of the earliest Chinese Buddhist translations, with attention both to what these texts can tell us about the initial reception of Buddhism in China and to the evidence they provide about otherwise lost scriptures and oral traditions that once circulated in India. Over the past two decades her research has been centered mainly on the works of the early third-century translator Zhi Qian支謙, with occasional forays into the study of other texts produced during the first two centuries of Chinese Buddhist translation activity as well. Her current research project deals with the Scripture in Forty-two Sections (Sishier zhang jing 四十二章經), with a focus on establishing the time and place where this famous but enigmatic text was produced and thus placing it within its proper context in the overall history of Chinese Buddhism.
Her publications include Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Philosophy of Decline (1991), A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (2003), and A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations (2008), as well as journal articles on a variety of topics.
