Categories of understanding along with everything else alter as societies change. - William Hardy McNeill

Religious history also offers another striking parallel between Rome and China. The Buddhist faith began to penetrate the Han empire in the first century A.D., and soon won converts in high places. Its period of official dominance in court circles extended from the third to the ninth centuries A.D. This obviously parallels the successes that came to Christianity in the Roman empire during the same period.

In Korea and Japan, the Chinese example began to find fertile ground as the political and social organization or those regions developed toward civilized complexity. Buddhist monks became the principle carriers of high Chinese culture to Korea and Japan. ...The Chinese model, while of the utmost importance, never eclipsed the local differences that made Japan always and Korea sometimes so distinct from China as properly to constitute a separate civilization.

Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas.