Xuanzang’s journey to India

Xuanzang, a monk from near Luoyang, was troubled by the incomplete and contradictory Chinese translations of Buddhist texts and wished, like Faxian two centuries earlier, to find the originals in India, above all the Yogācāra treatise on the stages of practice. The new Tang government forbade its subjects to leave the country, and the governor of Liangzhou, Li Daliang, ordered him back to the capital; Xuanzang went on in secret, travelling by night, and at Guazhou a sympathetic clerk tore up the warrant for his arrest. Alone, he crossed the desert beyond the Yumen Pass to Yiwu (Hami). His biography, written by his disciples Huili and Yancong, dates his departure to the autumn of 629, and his own memorial from Khotan to the fourth month of that year; a few texts give 627, and some scholars have preferred it because the Western Turkic khagan whom he met at Suyab, usually identified with Tong Yabghu, is thought to have died in 628, while Étienne de la Vaissière (2010) keeps 629 and takes the khagan to be Tong Yabghu’s son.

At Gaochang in the Turfan oasis King Qu Wentai detained the monk and tried to keep him, but in the end adopted him as a brother and equipped him for twenty years of travel — the biography lists 100 taels of gold, 30,000 silver coins, 500 bolts of silk, 30 horses, 25 servants and letters to 24 rulers — and sent him on to the khagan’s camp. By way of Kucha, the passes of the Tian Shan and Lake Issyk-Kul Xuanzang reached Suyab, then Tashkent and Samarkand, crossed the Iron Gate to Balkh and at Bamiyan described the colossal standing Buddhas. Through Kapisa and Gandhara he entered India, spent two years in Kashmir and, after visiting the holy places of the Ganges plain, settled at the great monastery of Nalanda, where he studied Yogācāra with the aged master Śīlabhadra; he later travelled through eastern and southern India.

In the early 640s King Harsha invited him to Kannauj, where, the biography says, he defended the Mahayana before an assembly of kings and monks for eighteen days without anyone daring to dispute him, and then to the great almsgiving at Prayaga. Harsha offered to send him home by sea, but Xuanzang replied that he had promised Qu Wentai to return by way of Gaochang — although by then the Tang had conquered Gaochang (640) and Qu Wentai was dead. Xuanzang came back over the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs to Kashgar and Khotan. There, having lost fifty bundles of texts in the Indus and seen his elephant drown, he wrote to Emperor Taizong confessing that he had left without permission after travelling ‘more than 50,000 li’ for seventeen years; the emperor welcomed him back. He reached Chang’an on 8 February 645 with 657 works in 520 bundles, carried by twenty horses, together with 150 relics and seven images of the Buddha, and in March was received at Luoyang by Taizong, who was preparing his campaign against Goguryeo and asked him to write an account of the western lands. The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, compiled with his disciple Bianji in 646, describe more than a hundred countries; Xuanzang spent the rest of his life translating, completing 75 works in 1,335 fascicles before his death in 664, and his journey later inspired the novel Journey to the West.