Journey

Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)

Stops (22)

1. Chang’an / Xi’an, China · home · left 399

   Set out from the Later Qin capital at about sixty-four with four companions, looking for a complete monastic code: the Chinese sangha was growing faster than its rulebook, and the Vinaya it was working from was partial. He had no permit, no patron and no map, and only one of the four was still with him at the end.

2. Dunhuang, China · through the Jade Gate

   Into the Gobi beyond Dunhuang. “In the desert were evil spirits and hot winds… there are neither birds above nor beasts below,” he wrote; travellers steered by the bones of those who had gone before. It took him three years to cross Central Asia, and the cave temples here were already being cut when he passed.

3. Khotan · Khotan, c. 401

   Three months at Khotan, where he found some ten thousand monks and watched the great image procession — a four-wheeled car nearly ten metres high, drawn to the city gate while the king took off his crown and walked barefoot before it. It is the earliest description of the ritual anywhere, and Khotan was then wholly Buddhist.

4. Kashgar · Kashgar and the Pamirs

   West along the southern rim of the Taklamakan and over the Pamirs, which he describes as snow winter and summer with a poisonous wind, and a ledge path above the Indus where a false step meant the river. He crossed by rope bridges and ladders cut into the cliff, and counted seven hundred of them.

5. Butkara & Swat valley · Udyana, the Swat valley

   He counted some five hundred monasteries in the Swat valley alone, the highest figure he gives anywhere, and was shown the Buddha's footprint and the rock on which he dried his robe as local objects rather than as metaphors. The valley's monasteries were abandoned within three centuries of his visit.

6. Gandhāra · Gandhara, still working

   Gandhara was still thick with stupas raised over the Buddha's body-sacrifice legends, and he records the giving away of eyes and flesh at named rocks around Takht-i-Bahi and Purushapura. Faxian's Gandhara is a functioning religious landscape; Xuanzang's, two centuries later, is a ruin. Faxian's Gandhara is a functioning religious landscape; Xuanzang's, two centuries later, is a ruin, and the pair of accounts is how that collapse is dated.

7. Takshashilā / Taxila · Takshashila, the severed head

   Takshashila — which he was told meant the severed head — where he was shown the place the Bodhisattva gave his body to a starving tigress. Xuanzang was shown the same rock two centuries later and recorded the same story, so the localisation of the legend held for at least that long.

8. Mathurā · Mathura, monasteries untaxed

   Down into the Ganga plain. At Mathura he found twenty monasteries and the order flourishing under kings who did not tax them — the kind of administrative detail only he records, and the thing that explains how twenty establishments were supported by one town. Mathura was also a Krishna centre by then, which he does not mention at all.

9. Sānkāshya / Sankisa · Sankasya and the ladder

   Sankasya, where the Buddha was believed to have come back down from the heaven of the Thirty-Three by a triple ladder, and where Faxian describes the shrine built over its remains. It is the least visited of the eight great places, and the Ashokan elephant capital he saw there is still standing.

10. Shrāvastī · Shravasti, half-empty

    Shravasti and the Jetavana, where the Buddha had spent most of his rainy seasons. He found the great monastery half-empty, with a few monks where thousands had lived, and wept at the vanished world. He is the first witness to the decline of Buddhism in its own heartland, three centuries before Xuanzang found it emptier still.

11. Kapilavastu (Tilaurakot) · Kapilavastu, deserted

    The Buddha's home city, which he found “a great scene of empty desolation” with neither king nor people, only monks and a score of families. The identification is still disputed between Tilaurakot in Nepal and Piprahwa in India, and his description is one of the things both sides argue from.

12. Lumbinī · Lumbini, the birth-grove

    Lumbini, the grove and the tank in which the newborn Buddha was washed. Ashoka's pillar, which fixes the site on the ground, was standing when he passed and was lost again until 1896, and the grove and the tank he describes are essentially what the excavated site still consists of.

13. Kushinagar · Kushinagar, a wilderness

    Kushinagara, the place of the parinirvana, likewise deserted — a wilderness with a handful of monks keeping the shrines. The desolation he records at all four of the great sites is the single most important thing in his account, and the reason it is read as evidence rather than as devotion.

14. Vaishālī · Vaishali

    Vaishali, where he records the stupa of the relics and the memory of the second Buddhist council. The Licchavi republic that had ruled the city was already only a memory when he arrived, and the relic stupa he saw has since been excavated and found to hold one of the eight original divisions of the ashes.

15. Pātaliputra · Pataliputra, three years

    Three years learning Sanskrit and copying the Vinaya. He saw Ashoka's stone palace, which he thought no human hands could have built, and describes the annual car-procession of images through the city and a free hospital endowed by the merchants. The palace was still standing six hundred years after it was built, and is gone now.

16. Rājagriha / Rajgir · Rajgir and the Vulture Peak

    Rajagriha and the Vulture Peak, where he sat alone through the night reciting and “was moved to tears”. It is the one wholly personal passage in the whole book, and he had walked four thousand miles to sit there. He also describes the cave of the first council and the hot springs below.

17. Bodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple · Bodh Gaya

    Bodh Gaya — the place of the awakening and the three monasteries around the tree, which he found well kept while the birth and death sites lay deserted. That contrast is the pattern of what survived and what did not: the enlightenment site kept its endowments and the biographical sites lost theirs.

18. Sārnāth · Sarnath

    Sarnath, the deer park of the first sermon, where he records the stupas and the place the five ascetics first saw the Buddha approaching. The plain around it was by then largely Brahmanical again, and Kashi five kilometres away was already what it is now. Kashi five kilometres away was already what it is now, so the Buddhist and Shaiva capitals of the plain sat in one urban landscape even then.

19. Tamralipta / Tamluk · Tamralipti, two more years

    Tamralipti, the Bengal port. Two more years copying texts and drawing images, then he took ship for Ceylon on the winter monsoon. He had been on the road fourteen years by then, and the sea route home is the part of the journey nobody before him had written down. The sea route home is the part of the journey nobody before him had written down at all.

20. Anurādhapura · Anuradhapura, two years

    Two years on the island. He watched the Tooth relic carried in procession, saw the great Bodhi tree grown from the Bodh Gaya cutting, and — hearing a Chinese merchant offer a white silk fan before an image — was suddenly, homesickly undone. It is the only time in the account he says he broke down.

21. Palembang / Srivijaya · storm-driven, five months

    Sailed east and was driven by storm to the island country he calls Ye-po-ti, where he waited five months for the monsoon; the identification wavers between Java and Sumatra. He almost died twice on this leg — once when the ship sprang a leak and the merchants began throwing cargo overboard, and once when they discussed putting the monk off as unlucky.

22. Jiankang / Nanjing · home · 414

    The last leg went badly wrong: blown far north, he made landfall in Shandong instead of Guangzhou, and never returned to Chang'an at all. He settled at Jiankang, translated the Vinaya he had walked across Asia to fetch, and wrote the Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. He was about seventy-eight, and had outlived every companion who set out with him.