Person · Chinese Buddhist monk and traveller
Yijing
Also known as I-tsing, I-ching, I Tsing, Yìjìng, Zhang Wenming, Sanzang Fashi Yijing
Yijing (635–713) was a Tang Chinese Buddhist monk who sailed to India in 671 by the sea route through South East Asia, studied at Nalanda for about ten years, and came home through Srivijaya in Sumatra, where he wrote his account of Buddhist practice. His records are a principal source for the sea road between China and India and for Srivijaya itself. Back in China in 695, he translated more than sixty texts, including the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya and the Diamond Sutra.
- Date
- 635 – 713
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He advised Chinese monks bound for India to spend a year or two first in the Srivijayan city of Bhoga, which he said had more than a thousand monks; in 689 he even sailed back to China briefly to fetch paper and ink.
His statement that a king 'Che-li-ki-to', identified with Sri Gupta, built a monastery in Bengal 500 years before his time does not fit the dates proposed for Sri Gupta and is rejected by many scholars as a tradition repeated to him by older men.
Connections (4)
- Studied atNalanda mahavihara
After visiting the main sites of the Buddha's life, Yijing came to Nalanda and stayed about ten years, which is why his biography lists Nalanda as his place of education. Much of his later work — more than sixty translations into Chinese, among them the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya — rests on the Sanskrit learning he gathered there, and his account of the four principal Buddhist schools of India describes the monastic world he saw from inside.
- Traveller routePalembang / Srivijaya
Yijing stopped in the Srivijaya realm in Sumatra on his way home from India, and again after a brief return to China in 689 to collect paper and ink. There he began his Record of Buddhist Practices Sent Home from the Southern Sea and translated texts, and he urged Chinese monks to train in the fortified city of Bhoga for a year or two before going on to India. His account is a principal source for Srivijaya's history.
- InfluencedXuanzang
Yijing grew up admiring Faxian and Xuanzang, the two Chinese monks who had made their names by travelling to India, and his own journey a generation after Xuanzang's followed their example by another road. Where Xuanzang went overland through Central Asia, Yijing went by sea in 671, and both studied at Nalanda. Tansen Sen's 2006 article on the travel records of Chinese pilgrims takes Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing as its three subjects.
- Traveller routeTamralipta / Tamluk
Tamralipta, the Bay of Bengal port near the Rupnarayan river, is among the places recorded by the Chinese monk travellers Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing. In the Gupta period it was the main emporium for sailings to Ceylon, Java and China, and it was linked by road to Rajagriha, Pataliputra and Varanasi, which made it the natural Indian end of a sea-borne pilgrimage like Yijing's, made along the maritime route through South East Asia.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Yijing (monk)"; "Tamralipta Kingdom". J. Takakusu (tr.), A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (1896); Li Rongxi (tr.), A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home from the South Seas (2000).
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