Journey
India–China: Buddhist & knowledge exchange
A thousand years of traffic in both directions: Chinese monks walking to India for texts and Indian monks going east to translate them, by the Karakoram passes, the Taklamakan oases and the Bay of Bengal. What moved was mostly manuscripts, and what came back was a Chinese canon larger than any Indian one that survives.
Stops (10)
- Takshashilā / Taxila · Taxila — the north-western gate
Where the Karakoram and Khyber routes met the Indian plain, and where Kashmiri Sarvāstivāda scholarship reached travellers heading for Central Asia. Faxian came through about 400. The Gandhāran sculptural idiom that went east to Dunhuang and on into China is this region's.
- Nālandā mahāvihāra · Nālandā — five years of Xuanzang
The destination. Xuanzang studied here from about 633 under Śīlabhadra and left with six hundred and fifty-seven manuscripts, which he then spent nineteen years translating. Yijing came a generation later by sea. Almost everything known about Nālandā's scale comes from Chinese accounts rather than Indian ones.
- Bodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple · Bodh Gayā — the object of the journey
The place every pilgrim was trying to reach. Chinese, Korean and Burmese inscriptions and votive stupas cluster at it, and the Mahābodhi temple's form was copied in miniature and carried home — a model of the building in a Chinese collection is how a design travelled four thousand kilometres.
- Kānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram · Kānchī — the southern point of departure
A city with a substantial Theravāda presence in the first millennium and the birthplace of Dhammapāla, the great commentator. It is also where Bodhidharma is traditionally said to have been a Pallava prince before sailing for China — the southern counterpart to the north-western land route.
- Tamralipta / Tamluk · Tāmralipta — the port for the sea road
The Bay of Bengal port from which Faxian sailed for Sri Lanka and then Java about 410, and through which Ashoka's mission is said to have left. By Yijing's time in the 670s the sea route through Srivijaya had largely replaced the overland one, and the ships were mostly not Indian.
- Dunhuang, China · Dunhuang — the oasis and the sealed cave
Where the desert routes meet, and where a walled-up library of some fifty thousand manuscripts in seventeen languages was opened in 1900 — Sanskrit, Tibetan, Khotanese, Sogdian, Chinese. It holds texts whose Indian originals are entirely lost, and the world's earliest dated printed book.
- Chang’an / Xi’an, China · Chang'an — where the translating happened
The Tang capital, and the largest city in the world at the time. Xuanzang came back here in 645 and spent nineteen years running a state-funded translation bureau at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, which was built to house what he had carried. Translation on that scale was an imperial project.
- Gautama Siddha (Qutan Xida) · 718 CE
An Indian astronomical family held office in the Tang capital across at least three generations. Gautama Siddha — Qutan Xida — produced the Jiuzhi-li, the Nine Seizers Canon, in 718: a Chinese rendering of an Indian system that brought the sine table and the written decimal zero into Chinese computational practice, and he compiled the Kaiyuan Zhanjing. Indian mathematics arrived in Chang'an by much the same route as Indian scripture, and the state put it to work.
- Shaolin Temple, China · Shaolin — the southern transmission
Tradition has Bodhidharma arrive from India by sea and sit nine years facing a wall at this Henan monastery, founding Chan — Zen in its Japanese form. The historical evidence is thin and late; what is certain is that Chinese Buddhism's most exported school chose to claim an Indian founder.
- Guangzhou / Canton, China · Guangzhou — the maritime gateway
The southern Chinese port where the sea route from India and Srivijaya came ashore. Indian and Persian merchant communities lived there from the Tang period under their own headmen, and monks including Bodhidharma, by tradition, landed here rather than crossing the passes — which is why Chan begins in the south and not at Chang'an.