Kumārāyana was an intelligent man from a noble family in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

, whose grandfather Ta-to was supposed to have had a great reputation. Kumārāyana renounced his wealth to become a Buddhist

Buddhism

Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...

 monk, and left India, crossing to the Pamirs to arrive in Kucha

Kucha

Kuchaor Kuche Uyghur , Chinese Simplified: 库车; Traditional: 庫車; pinyin Kùchē; also romanized as Qiuzi, Qiuci, Chiu-tzu, Kiu-che, Kuei-tzu from the traditional Chinese forms 屈支 屈茨; 龜玆; 龟兹, 丘玆, also Po ; Sanskrit: Kueina, Standard Tibetan: Kutsahiyui was an ancient Buddhist kingdom...

. There he became the royal priest, and the sister of the king, Jīva

Jiva (nun)

Jīva was a sister of a king of Kucha, and later a Buddhist nun.At a young age, Jīva fell in love with Kumārāyana, a noble Indian who renounced his fortune to become a Buddhist monk and thus travelled to Kucha. Jīva and Kumārāyana married and produced a son, Kumārajīva...

, fell in love with him. They married to produced a son called Kumārajīva

Kumarajiva

Kumārajīva; was a Kuchean Buddhist monk, scholar, and translator. He first studied teachings of the Sarvastivada schools, later studied under Buddhasvāmin, and finally became a Mahāyāna adherent, studying the Madhyamaka doctrine of Nagarjuna. Kumārajīva settled in Chang'an, which was the imperial...

who, largely under Jīva's guidance, went on to become an erudite Buddhist scholar and translator.