East Asia (6th–10th c.)Travel and discovery

Ennin’s pilgrimage to Tang China

In 838 the Tendai monk Ennin sailed with a Japanese embassy to Tang China. Denied leave to visit Mount Tiantai, he stayed behind with the help of the Silla communities of Shandong, made a pilgrimage to Mount Wutai, studied for five years in Chang’an and lived through the persecution of Buddhism before returning home in 847. His day-by-day diary is one of the richest eyewitness accounts of Tang China.

Date: 12 July 838 – 30 October 847exact date · duration: ≈ 9 yearsDate in the Julian calendar
Place: Chang’antoday: Xi’an, Shaanxi, China · East Asia
Route: Kōrokan, Hakata → Yangzhou → Lotus Cloister, Mount Chi (Chishan) → Mount Wutai → Chang’an → Chuzhou (Huai’an) → Lotus Cloister, Mount Chi (Chishan) → Kōrokan, Hakata
Participants: Ennin, Tang dynasty
Threads: East Asia (6th–10th c.)
Also known as: Ennin's Diary; Nittō guhō junrei kōki; Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law; Записки о паломничестве в Тан в поисках Закона; Нитто гухо дзюнрэй коки; 入唐求法巡禮行記; 入唐求法巡礼行記

Ennin, a disciple of Saichō, joined the embassy of Fujiwara no Tsunetsugu as a short-term student monk. His diary opens on 8 July 838; four days later the ships left Hakata, and after a crossing in which his ship was wrecked on the shoals of the Yangtze estuary he landed in Hailing county of Yangzhou prefecture on 26 July — the same day, he noted, by both the Japanese and the Chinese calendars. The Tang authorities refused to let him go to Mount Tiantai, and in 839, when the embassy sailed home, he stayed behind at the Lotus Cloister on Mount Chi in Shandong, a temple of the Silla community founded by Jang Bogo.

With travel papers from the authorities of Qingzhou, Ennin reached the sacred mountains of Wutai on 2 June 840 and entered Chang’an on 21 September, where he received esoteric initiations at the Daxingshan and Qinglong monasteries. His petitions to go home — more than a hundred, he wrote — were refused until Emperor Wuzong’s persecution of Buddhism ordered foreign monks without Tang ordination certificates back to lay life. Ennin put on lay clothes on 21 June 845 and left the capital two days later. After two years of waiting on the eastern coast he sailed from Mount Chi on the ship of the merchant Kim Jin on 14 October 847, reached the coast of Hizen on 22 October and arrived at the Kōrokan, the government guest house at Hakata, on 30 October.

Ennin brought back many scriptures and mandalas, became head (zasu) of the Tendai school in 854 and was posthumously named Jikaku Daishi in 866. His Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, a diary in four books written in Chinese, describes official procedures, roads and lodgings, festivals, the Silla communities of the coast and the persecution of 845; it survives in a manuscript copied in 1291, now a National Treasure of Japan, and became widely known through Edwin O. Reischauer’s English translation of 1955.

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Saichō and Kūkai bring Tendai and Shingon Buddhism from Tang China14 August 804 – 5 December 806 · East AsiaEnnin was a disciple of Saichō and in 854 became head of the Tendai school
Jang Bogo’s Cheonghae garrison and the trade of the Yellow Seabetween 18 May and 15 June 828 – between December 841 and April 846 · East AsiaEnnin stayed at the Lotus Cloister on Mount Chi founded by Jang Bogo and wrote to him in 840; his diary is one of the few sources on Jang
Huichang persecution: Emperor Wuzong suppresses the Buddhist monasteries10 May – 12 September 845 · East AsiaEnnin watched the persecution in Chang’an and was sent home in lay dress
Devapala’s Nalanda charter for the monastery of Balaputrabetween 844 and 860 · South AsiaAt Mount Wutai in 840 Ennin was told that three monks from Nalanda had visited the year before