Yijing’s voyage to India and his years in Srivijaya

Yijing (635–713), who had long admired Faxian and Xuanzang, left Guangzhou in the eleventh month of 671 with the help of the family of the official Feng Xiaoquan and reached Bhoga, the capital of Srivijaya, in less than twenty days. The king helped him on to Malayu — which, he later noted, had since become part of Srivijaya — and to Jiecha, usually identified with Kedah, from where a royal ship carried him past the ‘land of the naked people’, the Nicobar Islands, to the port of Tamralipti in eastern India, which he reached in 673. He spent some fourteen years in India, about ten of them at Nalanda, where, he reports, the revenues of two hundred villages supported the monks, and he described in detail the rules and daily life of the monastery.

On his way home he settled in Srivijaya. ‘In the fortified city of Bhoga,’ he wrote, ‘Buddhist priests number more than 1,000’, studying all subjects as in India, and he advised Chinese monks to spend a year or two there before going on to India. He copied and translated texts there; in 689, having gone aboard a ship at the river mouth to send a letter to Guangzhou asking for paper and ink, he was carried off to China by a favourable wind, but he sailed back to Srivijaya the same year with four companions. In 692 he sent home his Record of Buddhist Practices Sent Home from the Southern Sea and his Memoirs of eminent monks who sought the Law in the Western Regions, with biographies of Chinese and Korean pilgrims to India, and in the summer of 695 he returned to China, where Empress Wu Zetian welcomed him at Luoyang. He brought back some four hundred texts. Together with the inscriptions, his account is among the most important sources on Srivijaya in the years of its rise.