Faxian’s journey to India and back by sea

Faxian deplored the “mutilated and imperfect” state of the Vinaya, the monastic rules, in China. By his own account he left Chang’an, the capital of the Later Qin, with four fellow monks — Huijing, Daozheng, Huiying and Huiwei — in a jihai year, that is 399 (the text also calls it the second year of Hongshi, which was 400; Legge and later scholars take 399). Five more monks joined them at Zhangye. Supplied by Li Gao, the prefect of Dunhuang (later founder of the Western Liang), they crossed the desert, where the only marks of the way were the bones of the dead, to Shanshan and Agni, and then turned south-west across the Taklamakan to Khotan, where Faxian stayed three months to see the great procession of Buddha images. Over the Pamirs they entered North India — Udyana, Gandhara, Purushapura — and Huijing died of cold crossing the Little Snowy Mountains.

In the Ganges plain, under the Gupta king Chandragupta II, Faxian visited the places of the Buddha’s life — Kapilavastu, Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Shravasti, Kushinagar — and described the country as prosperous and its punishments as mild. At Pataliputra he found a copy of the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya and stayed three years, learning Sanskrit and copying texts; Daozheng decided to remain in India for good, and Faxian went on alone. He spent two years at the port of Tamralipti in Bengal, sailed for fourteen days to Sri Lanka, stayed there two more years, saw the festival of the Buddha’s tooth at Anuradhapura and obtained further scriptures. By his own reckoning he needed six years to reach Central India, stayed six and took three to return, passing through “a few under thirty” countries.

Homeward, his merchant ship with more than 200 people aboard sprang a leak in a storm and after about ninety days reached Yepoti, probably Java, where, he noted, Brahmanism flourished and Buddhism was insignificant. After five months he sailed for Guangzhou on another ship on the sixteenth day of the fourth month (in May 412), but storms drove it off course, and the Brahmans on board wanted to put the monk ashore as the cause of their troubles. After more than seventy days the crew turned north-west and landed on the south shore of Mount Lao on the Shandong peninsula; two hunters told them that the next day was the fifteenth of the seventh month — so it was about 5 September 412 — and that the land belonged to the Jin. After a winter and a summer at Qingzhou, Faxian went south to the capital, Jiankang, and there, with the Indian monk Buddhabhadra, translated texts he had brought, among them the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya. His Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, whose own text ends in the jiayin year, 414, while a postscript by another hand is dated 416, is one of the chief sources on Central Asia, India under the Guptas and Sri Lanka at the turn of the 5th century.