It seems probable that the Hinayanist portion of the Chinese Tripitaka is in the main a translation of the Canon of the Sarvastivadins which must have consisted of: 

    (1) Four Agamas or Nikayas only, for the Dhammapada
    is placed outside the Sutta Pitaka.

    (2) A voluminous Vinaya covering the same ground as the
    Pali recension but more copious in legend and anecdote.

    (3) An Abhidharma entirely different from the Pali works
    bearing this name.

It might seem to follow from this that the whole Pali Abhidharma and some important works such as the Thera-Therigatha were unknown to the Hinayanists of Central Asia and Northern India in the early centuries of our era.  But caution is necessary in drawing such inferences, for until recently it might have been said that the Sutta Nipata also was unknown, whereas fragments of it in a Sanskrit version have now been discovered in Eastern Turkestan.[779] The Chinese editors draw a clear distinction between Hinayanist and Mahayanist scriptures.  They exclude from the latter works analogous to the Pali Nikayas and Vinaya, and also the Abhidharma of the Sarvastivadins.  But the labours of Hsuan Chuang and I-Ching show that this does not imply the rejection of all these works by Mahayanists.

5

Buddhist literary activity has an interesting side aspect, namely the expedients used to transliterate Indian words, which almost provided the Chinese with an alphabet.  To some extent Indian names, particularly proper names possessing an obvious meaning, are translated.  Thus Asoka becomes Wu-yu, without sorrow:  Asvaghosha, Ma-ming or horse-voice, and Udyana simply Yuan or park.[780] But many proper names did not lend themselves to such renderings and it was a delicate business to translate theological terms like Nirvana and Samadhi.  The Buddhists did not perhaps invent the idea of using the Chinese characters so as to spell with moderate precision,[781] but they had greater need of this procedure than other writers and they used it extensively[782] and with such variety of detail that though they invented some fifteen different syllabaries, none of them obtained general acceptance and Julien[783] enumerates 3000 Chinese characters used to represent the sounds indicated by 47 Indian letters.  Still, they gave currency[784] to the system known as fan-ch’ieh which renders a syllable phonetically by two characters, the final of the first and the initial of the second not being pronounced.  Thus, in order to indicate the sound Chung, a Chinese dictionary will use the two characters chu yung, which are to be read together as Ch ung.