Xuanzang: Return of the Pilgrim
Today, we’re going to continue our talk about Xuanzang taking a closer look at his stay in India, his odyssey on the way home, and how his translations of the Buddhist sutras and the records of his travels in Central and South Asia have been of inestimable value to Buddhism, as well as to world history and archaeology.
After four years of trials and tribulations on the road, Xuanzang finally arrived at the great monastery at Nalanda where he became a disciple of the venerable Silabhadra.
According to legend, Silabhadra, the abbot of Nalanda, once considered suicide after suffering for years from a degenerative illness. But he had a dream in which he received instructions from deities, asking him to endure and wait for the arrival of a Chinese monk in order to guarantee the preservation of the Mahayana tradition abroad.
It was at Nalanda that the 100-year-old Silabhadra took 15 months to teach the Treatise on the Foundation for Yoga Practitioners, which is a large and influential compendium containing 40,000 verses of the Mahayana Buddhist doctrines.
Xuanzang stayed at Nalanda for five years, studying Buddhist scriptures, Sanskrit, and the Brahmana philosophy. Then Xuanzang started on his travels again, going along the west and east coasts of India to visit all the sacred sites connected with the life of the Buddha. Another five years later, he returned to Nalanda as he prepared to return to the Tang Empire.
During his 10 years in India, Xuanzang mastered vast and comprehensive knowledge of Buddhist texts in their original Sanskrit forms while collecting Indic Buddhist texts that had never before been translated into Chinese. He also studied with Buddhist masters and engaged in various religious debates. In fact, there was one occasion when King Harsha, the last great Buddhist King of India, invited Xuanzang to engage in an 18-day religious assembly to participate in a debate, during which, it is said, Xuanzang defeated 500 Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists. Thoroughly impressed by Xuanzang’s skills in debate, as well as his legendary journey, the king gave Xuanzang his best elephant, an escort to carry his books, and thousands of gold and silver coins for his journey back home.
Xuanzang departed from Nalanda in the year 643, bringing with him 657 Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit, some 150 sacred relics of the Buddha, and seven precious miniature statues of the Buddha collected from the sacred places he had visited in India. It was a journey of over 25,000 kilometers, crossing 110 states over a course of 16 years. Before departing home, Xuanzang wrote a letter to the ruling Tang emperor Taizong, confessing his mistake of sneaking out of the country and attributing his pilgrimage and all its achievements to the emperor.
Differing from the route he took going to India, Xuanzang’s homeward journey followed the caravan track along which he climbed the Pamir Mountains. And remembering his promise to his sworn brother Qu Wentai, he intended to drop by Gaochang. However, halfway there, he learned from a Gaochang merchant that Qu had already passed away. Saddened by the news, Xuanzang decided to go directly back to China, taking the same route that Marco Polo would do some six centuries later.
In the spring of 644, he reached Khotan in present-day Xinjiang, where he had to stop and wait for Emperor Taizong’s reply to his request for return. As you may recall, Xuanzang had slipped across the border illegally. Half a year later, Xuanzang received the emperor’s decree, departed from Khotan for Dunhuang, and finally arrived in Chang’an in the year 645.
Returning to the capital after an absence of 16 years, Xuanzang was accorded a celebratory welcome and was received by Emperor Taizong a few days later. The emperor was so enthralled by Xuanzang’s accounts of foreign lands that he offered Xuanzang a ministerial post, but Xuanzang was determined to serve Buddhism and declined the imperial offer.
At Emperor Taizong’s request, Xuanzang completed his book Great Tang Records on the Western Regions in the year 646, which is both an account of his religious pilgrimage and a detailed report of the neighboring areas in Central and South Asia. It inspired Ming novelist Wu Cheng’en nine centuries later to pen the literary classic Journey to the West. The book was first translated into French by the Sinologist Stanislas Julien in 1857 and is of great value to modern historians. In fact, archaeologists successfully discovered the sites of many famous temples, including the Nalanda Temple, by referring to clues provided in the book.
In the year 648, Xuanzang was appointed by Emperor Taizong as the abbot of the Da Ci’en Temple in Chang’an. It was in this temple that Xuanzang devoted the rest of his life to the translation of the Buddhist scriptures. He pooled together a team of more than 20 translators, all well-versed in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Buddhism.
In the year 652, Xuanzang proposed to the emperor that a pagoda should be built within the Da Ci’en Temple to store the scriptures and statues he brought back from India. The emperor readily agreed and had Xuanzang to supervise its construction. Xuanzang designed and named the pagoda after the Wild Goose Pagoda, which used to exist near Nalanda.
There’s an interesting legend about how the Indian pagoda got its name. One day, a monk in a Hinayana temple was worried about the shortage of meat. Yes, within the two sects in Buddhism, the Mahayana believers were vegetarians, while the Hinayana believers were not. When the Hinayana monk was praying to the Buddha for meat, a flock of wild geese happened to fly over, and the lead goose dropped dead on the ground where he was praying. The monk realized that this was the Buddha’s answer when he requested meat. From then on, the Hinayana believers became vegetarians. The monks in the temple built a pagoda where the goose dropped and gave it the name Wild Goose Pagoda to commemorate the dead goose and the mercy of the Buddha.
Today, the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda that Xuanzang designed and constructed has become a famous landmark in Xi’an as well as a holy place for Chinese Buddhists.
With the pagoda’s construction complete and the translations from Sanskrit going well, Xuanzang was struck by two pieces of bad news. For one, his major translation assistant, monk Bianji, was executed because of an affair with one of Emperor Taizong’s daughters. For the other, he learned from an Indian monk that his teacher Silabhadra had died.
Remembering Silabhadra’s teachings at the Nalanda University and his instructions upon Xuanzang’s departure, Xuanzang was overwhelmed by grief and translated Buddhist scriptures day and night.
Although a number of his disciple translators encouraged him to render an abridged version, Xuanzang was determined to maintain the sutras in their full integrity. He was able to complete about 47 sutras in 1,335 volumes during 19 years of hard work. His translations include some of the most important Mahayana scriptures, including the fundamental Treatise on the Great Virtue of Wisdom.
When it comes to the reason why the 5,000-year Chinese civilization has continued to flourish despite its ups and downs, the famed Indologist, linguist, paleographer, and writer, Ji Xianlin, attributes it to the role of translation.
He said: “Chinese culture and civilization is just like a river, and sometimes the river is full of water and sometimes it is short of water, but it never dries up thanks to the injection of new water. There have been many injections of water throughout China’s long history, but there are two largest ones. One is the water from India and the other is from Western countries. Both times hinged on translation. The prosperity of Chinese culture is heavily dependent on translation.”
Influenced by the Yogacara school, Xuanzang established the Weishi, literally ideation only, school of Buddhism. Its main premise is that the universe is but a representation of the mind. Though it flourished for only a short time, its theories regarding perception, consciousness, karma, and rebirth found their way into the doctrines of other more successful schools.
Japanese monk Dosho arrived in China in the year 653 and studied under Xuanzang for eight years. He founded the Hosso school in Japan, which is believed to have been based on the doctrines of the Weishi school and continued its philosophy. It became the most influential Buddhist school during the 7th and 8th centuries in Japan.
On February 5, 664, Xuanzang, as usual, started to translate some Buddhist text. After working on several lines, he simply put down the book and told his disciples that his day has arrived. Xuanzang passed away. On April 14, Xuanzang was buried and over one million people including the imperial households, commoners, Buddhists and non-religious people alike attended the event.
His life and works are an incredible contribution to world history. While his main purpose was to obtain Buddhist books and to receive instruction on Buddhism while in India, he ended up doing so much more.
Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India was unprecedented as was the written account of his travels and the translations of Buddhist texts he left behind. Xuanzang discovered his true calling and resolutely set out to pursue it. He inspires the pilgrim, the explorer, and the scholar in all of us.
Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Lü Weitao, translator Yang Guang, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.