Ji Xianlin, who was born in Shandong in 1911 and died in 2009, was admitted to Tsinghua University as a major in Western literature in 1930. After graduated, he worked as a teacher at Shangdong Jian senior high school. In 1935, he went to University of Göttingen as an exchange student, choosing in 1936 to major in Sanskrit and less well known ancient languages, receiving his Ph.D. in 1941.In 1946, he returned to China, becoming a professor at Peking University, and began a long career as one of China's greatest scholars of ancient Indian languages and culture, during the course of which he made discoveries not only about such things as Buddhism's migration from India to China, but also more mundane cultural changes, such as the spread of paper and silk making from China to India.

The representative works of Ji include "The History of China-India Cultural Relations" (published by The Peoples Press in 1957), "Ji Xianlin Essays" (published by Beijing University Press in 1986), "Eastern Short Stories" (published by China Youth Press in 1988), etc.

Moreover, he translated many works, such as "Anna Seghers novels", "Shakuntala Cabhiyan Shakuntalam", "Panchtantra", etc.