Place · Tang capital & Buddhist centre · China

Chang’an / Xi’an, China

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Tang Buddhist records; Xuanzang’s travel account

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.267, 108.955

Connections (9)

• Nalanda to Tang ChinaNālandā mahāvihāra

  Nalanda was the destination and Chang'an was where the results were deposited. Xuanzang studied there for years, Yijing counted its buildings and described its daily routine, and the manuscripts they carried back went into imperial translation bureaus at the Tang capital — Xuanzang's own, at the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, employed dozens of scholars for two decades. The texts that shaped East Asian Buddhism for a millennium came out of this one institution.

• Bodh Gaya to Tang ChinaBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple

  Bodh Gaya was the destination of the whole Chinese pilgrim tradition, and Chang'an was where its results were deposited: Xuanzang returned there in 645 with hundreds of manuscripts and spent the rest of his life translating them under imperial patronage at the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, built to house them. The texts, the relics and the travel accounts that shaped East Asian Buddhism for a thousand years came back along that road.

• Chinese Buddhist networkShaolin Temple, China

  Shaolin in Henan and the translation bureaus at Chang'an are the two ends of what Indian Buddhism became in China: an institution that turned meditation practice into a monastic discipline with a founding legend about an Indian monk, and a state office that turned Sanskrit into literary Chinese. Chan's claim to a transmission outside the scriptures is made in Chinese, about an Indian, by people who had the scriptures in Chinese because of Chang'an.

• Life routeXuanzang

  Xuanzang left Chang'an illegally in 629 against an imperial travel ban, was away sixteen years, and returned in 645 to an emperor who forgave him and funded a translation bureau. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built to hold the manuscripts, and he translated there for nineteen years until he died.

• TransmissionBrahmagupta

  The Brāhmasphutasiddhānta reached Baghdad about 771, was translated into Arabic as the Sindhind, and is how the decimal place-value system with a zero entered Islamic mathematics and from there Europe. Al-Khwārizmī's arithmetic is built on it. The digits Europe calls Arabic numerals are the ones this book carried west, which is the single most consequential export in the history of Indian science.

• Teaching lineageKumārajīva

  Kumarajiva was born at Kucha to an Indian father of a Kashmiri brahmin family, trained in Kashmir, held for sixteen years by a Chinese general who understood his value, and finally installed at Chang'an in 401 at the head of a state translation bureau with hundreds of assistants. The Lotus, Diamond and Vimalakirti sutras and Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka in his versions are what East Asia actually reads — chosen over later and more literal translations for the quality of their Chinese.

• TransmissionKucha & the Kizil caves

  Kuchean music and musicians were so prized at the Tang court that the Kucha ensemble became one of the standard court orchestras, and the pipa and several other Chinese instruments came west to east through this oasis. The same road that carried Kumarajiva's translations carried the music, and Tang Chang'an's taste for Central Asian song, dance and dress is one of the clearest cultural effects of the route.

• Power passed toJiankang / Nanjing

  He left from Chang'an and came home to Jiankang, a thousand kilometres apart and under different dynasties, because the ship that should have made Guangzhou was blown to Shandong. The translation he finished in the south is what the journey was for, and the Chinese monastic code still in use descends from the text he carried back.

• Imperial administration ofGautama Siddha (Qutan Xida)

  An Indian astronomical family held office in the Tang capital for at least three generations. Gautama Siddha — Qutan Xida in Chinese — produced the Jiuzhi-li in 718, a Chinese rendering of an Indian system that brought the sine table and the written decimal zero into Chinese computational practice, and compiled the Kaiyuan Zhanjing. Chang'an was the terminus of the Buddhist translation traffic, so Indian mathematics arrived in the same city and by much the same route as Indian scripture, and was put to work by the state.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
• India–China: Buddhist & knowledge exchange

Sources

Metropolitan Museum of Art — Internationalism in the Tang Dynasty; Chinese Buddhist art scholarship

• Wikipedia