When we combine this chronological information with the fact that in a significant number of cases Ch. mo-fa corresponds to Skt. Paścimakāle (i.e., to an expression that is more regularly translated into Chinese as mo-shih), we may find the key to our puzzle: namely, that mo-fa originated simply was a variant of mo-shih, introduced by a Chinese writer already familiar with the periodization scheme built on sequential eras of cheng-fa and hsiang-fa, respectively. Viewed in this context it would have required only a small leap of inference to conclude that mo-shih (which implies, unlike its Sanskrit counterpart, not merely a “latter” but a final period) was meant as a reference to a discrete third period in the history of the Dharma, which could be expressed more clearly (or at least more symmetrically) by the term mo-fa. Once mo-fa had gained some currency—a process that must have been stimulated by the use of the term in some of the translations of Kumārajīva, whose works are among the most influential ever produced in China—the die was cast, and it fell to the lot of Chinese Buddhist scholastic writers to expound on the nature and duration of this supposed third period. In light of this scenario, it should no longer surprise us that the first extended discussion of the three-period time scheme appears well after the introduction of the term mo-fa in the works of Kumārajīva and others, and that such discussions appear not in translated sūtras, but in the works of Chinese commentators themselves.

If this line of reasoning is correct we should no longer view the term mo-fa as a Chinese translation of an Indian Buddhist term, but rather as a stylistic variant of mo-shih (itself a genuine translation of Skt. Paścimakāle …). The term mo-fa subsequently took on a life of its own, stimulating seemingly endless commentarial reflections in East Asia. Mo-fa is thus a Chinese “apocryphal word”: a term created in China, with no identifiable Indian antecedent.