I-Ching
634-712
Chinese Pilgrim
As a Buddhist monk who traveled to India from China, I-ching followed in the footsteps of earlier pilgrims Fa-hsien (c. 334-c. 422) and Hsüan-tsang (602-664). He did not, however, follow them in a literal sense: instead of crossing the mountains that divided China and India in the west, I-ching took an easterly route, via the waters between the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago.
After hearing of Hsüan-tsang's exploits, I-ching, along with 37 other monks, resolved to visit the homeland of the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama; 563-483 B.C.) himself. The group traveled to Canton in order to board a ship for India, but at the last minute, the other monks got cold feet; therefore I-ching was alone when in 671 he boarded a Persian ship bound for what is now Indonesia.
Sailing past Poulo Condore off the southern coast of the Malay Peninsula in what is now Vietnam, the ship went on to Palembang, a trading center on the southeastern coast of Sumatra. I-ching tarried there for half a year before taking a Sumatran vessel to the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. (Today the Nicobars, just west of Sumatra and south of the Andaman Islands, constitute the extreme southeastern fringe of India's territory.) From the Nicobars he sailed to Tamralipti, a port on the Ganges delta where Fa-hsien had spent part of his Indian sojourn nearly three centuries before.
I-ching devoted his first three years in India to learning Sanskrit at the Buddhist temple of Varaha in Tamralipti. Then he sailed up the Ganges to the Buddhist center of Nalanda, where Hsüan-tsang had gone before, and spent adecade studying the Buddhist scriptures there. He also compiled a library of as many as 10,000 sacred texts, which he brought back to China and with which he greatly increased the scope of Buddhist learning in his homeland.
In all, I-ching visited some 30 different principalities and kingdoms throughout India before concluding his time in that country. He then traveled back to Sumatra, where he lived for many years while translating the texts he had brought with him. It is possible that he returned briefly to Canton in 689 to recruit monks who could help him with his translation work. In any case, he finally returned to his native Honan province in 693 or 694, nearly three decades after he left China.
During the remainder of his life, I-ching stayed busy translating some 56 Buddhist texts into Chinese. He also wrote a book on the travels of numerous Buddhist pilgrims to India, as well as one discussing various religious practices of the Sumatran and Indian peoples.
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