Born 602,
Chin-liu, China
Died 664,
Sian, China
Hsüan-tsang was born the youngest of four sons in the town of Chin-liu, China. His father was a member of the Mandarin class of officials who governed China. It is said that Hsüan-tsang started reading the sacred Buddhist texts at the age of eight. Impressed by Hsüan-tsang’s studiousness, one of his older brothers, a Buddhist monk, had him brought to the monastery in Luo-yang, a city on the Yellow River. Hsüan-tsang did so well that he was one of only 14 students in China awarded a scholarship to come to the monastery to study Buddhist texts.
At the fall of the Sui dynasty in 618, China experienced a period of strife and upheaval. In order to escape this, Hsüan-tsang went to the new capital of the T’ang dynasty (618-906) at Ch’ang-an. Unable to find the peace he sought, he traveled on to the monastery at Ch’eng-tu, located in the Szechwan province in south-central China, where he found serenity and prosperity. Fully ordained as a monk at the age of 20, he then returned to Ch’ang-an. Conditions in the country had begun to improve as the T’ang emperor established control. Taking advantage of the freer environment, Hsüan-tsang decided to follow the example of Fa-Hsien—a Chinese Buddhist monk who made an epic voyage to India to collect religious texts—and travel to India to discuss Buddhist texts with learned men. In an account he wrote years later, he said his aim was to “travel to the countries of the west [in Asia] in order to question the wise men” on the points that were troubling his mind.
Beginning his trip from the city of Sian in 629, Hsüan-tsang traveled to Liang-chou, where he served as a guest lecturer at a monastery. When he was told by the governor that he could not travel to India, he ignored the order and slipped out of town with the aid of two monks. On several occasions Hsüan-tsang was stopped by border guards at the frontier. Each time, however, they allowed him to pass, telling him about a detour around the last and most dangerous guard post. The detour sent him and his horse into the southern Gobi Desert, where he lost his way and dropped his water bag. According to his chronicles, he traveled four nights and five days without water until his horse found a spring. They eventually reached Ha-mi, an oasis in western China.
From Ha-mi Hsüan-tsang was escorted by an honor guard sent by the king of Turfan (now in Chinese Turkistan). The king was a devout Buddhist and wanted to keep the eminent monk at his court. When Hsüan-tsang declined the offer, the king supplied him with horses, provisions, money, and letters of introduction to the countries he planned to visit. Proceeding westward by way of the oases of Kharashahr and Kucha the following spring, Hsüan-tsang crossed the Tien Shan range and descended to Issyk-Kul, a lake in what is now the Republic of Kyrgyzstan on the border of China. There he met the khan of the western Turks, who was pleased to receive the Chinese monk. Moving on, Hsüan-tsang traveled through the khan’s capital at Tashkent, the city of Samarkand, and then through the Iron Gates gorge to Bactria (modern Afghanistan). In Bactria he visited the city of Balkh, where he saw many relics of the Buddha.
Crossing the Hindu Kush Mountains, Hsüan-tsang arrived in Bamian, where he saw a figure of the Buddha that was carved out of stone and stood 140 to 150 feet high. During the summer of 630, he traveled down the Kabul River through present-day Pakistan into the cities of Peshawar and Taxila (which is now in ruins near the Pakistani capital at Islamabad). From there Hsüan-tsang journeyed to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, where, according to his chronicle, he was greeted by the king, his ministers, and 1,000 monks. Hsüan-tsang stayed in Srinagar until early 633, studying Buddhist texts with nine monks who were experts in various fields.
In the Punjab, a region in northwest India and Pakistan, Hsüan-tsang and his party were assaulted by 50 bandits, and they escaped only because Hsüan-tsang was able to slip away to get help. They traveled on to the headwaters of the Ganges, the sacred river of India, and then stopped at Kannauj. Hsüan-tsang stayed in Kannauj for three months to study with a famous Buddhist master and to study Sanskrit, the language in which the Buddhist texts were written. He then sailed down the Ganges to Kanpur. During the voyage Hsüan-tsang’s boat was captured by pirates who wanted to sacrifice him to their god. As he was preparing to die, the pirate boats were hit by a cyclone and destroyed. To avoid an even worse fate, the pirates released Hsüan-tsang immediately.
In the vicinity of Allahabad and Varanasi in northern India, Hsüan-tsang visited the sacred sites where the historical Buddha lived (in an area then controlled by the kingdom of Magadha). At the village of Kasia he saw the place where the Buddha had entered Nirvana—a state of bliss and release from suffering that is the religious goal of Buddhism. Hsüan-tsang stayed there for five years, from 633 to 637, studying the sacred texts at the great monastery of Nalanda.
After leaving the monastery, Hsüan-tsang continued down the Ganges to the port of Tamralipti. From there he sailed down the eastern coast of India and visited southern India and Maharashtra in west-central India. Turning north, he stopped again near Nalanda to study nonreligious subjects, such as mathematics and geography, with a famous teacher. Next he went farther northeast to Gauhati to convert the king to Buddhism. Finally, in 643, after taking leave of the monks at Nalanda, Hsüan-tsang headed back toward his native country, crossing the Thar Desert and the Indus River. Although he was able to cross the Indus safely on the back of an elephant, the monk who followed him was swept away by the current. The monk had been carrying Hsüan-tsang’s manuscripts and a collection of rare seeds; he survived but his cargo was lost.
Crossing the high mountains into central Asia, Hsüan-tsang faced many hazards. He survived blizzards and storms and the death of his elephant, who drowned while fleeing an attack by bandits. Hsüan-tsang reached Kashgar, in what is now the westernmost part of China, and then proceeded to Hotien, the capital of the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, where the king came out to greet him. Hsüan-tsang spent seven or eight months in Khotan lecturing about the knowledge he had acquired during his pilgrimage.
In the spring of 645, after a journey of 40,000 miles, he finally returned to Sian, to which he brought 150 Buddhist relics, 6 statues, and more than 650 religious texts, 73 of which he had translated from Sanskrit. At the order of the emperor, Hsüan-tsang wrote about his experiences. He had completed his book, Ta-T’ang Si-Yu-Ki (“Memoirs on Western Countries”), by the time he died in 664.
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