A massive amount of Buddhist literature was transmitted from India to China during the first millennium CE via the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. Though historians of Chinese medicine have paid little attention to this transmission, in fact, a wide range of Indian medical ideas and practices were embedded in these Buddhist texts. My talk will discuss how these long-forgotten Chinese translations provide a "missing link" between Indo-European and East Asian medical systems, and how this moment of crosscultural exchange challenges some of the prevailing assumptions in the Chinese, Indian, and global histories of medicine.