Place · southern capital & translation centre · China
Jiankang / Nanjing
Also known as Jiankang, Nanjing, Daochang monastery, Jingzhou
The southern Chinese capital where Faxian finally settled after fourteen years abroad and a voyage that put him ashore in Shandong instead of Guangzhou. He translated the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya he had walked across Asia to fetch, and wrote the Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, here and at nearby Jingzhou.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.060, 118.797
Worth knowing
He never returned to Chang'an, which is where he had set out from, and he was about eighty when he finished the work. The translation he brought back is the reason the journey was made: the Chinese order had been growing for two centuries without a complete monastic code to follow.
Connections (1)
- Power passed toChang’an / Xi’an, China
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nanjing”. Faxian, Foguo Ji, trans. James Legge as A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (1886); Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (1959).
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