Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing Travelled to India Between 399 and 695, and Their Books Gave Archaeologists the Distances That Located Nalanda

The Chinese name for India, Yindu (印度), is Xuanzang’s choice. In the book he wrote after coming home, the monk Xuanzang (玄奘, Xuánzàng) listed the older names for the country, said its people named it differently from district to district, and settled on In-tu, which he explained means the moon in Chinese. Takakusu, who translated a second pilgrim’s book, notes that Yindu came into general use in China from Xuanzang’s time.

Three Chinese Buddhist monks left travel books on what they found in India, and the historian Upinder Singh says these are the only records by Chinese monks of the period that survive in full. Faxian (法显, Fǎxiǎn) set out from Chang’an in 399 and was home about 414. Xuanzang left in 629 and returned in 645. Yijing (义净, Yìjìng) sailed from Canton in 671 and was back in China in 695. The sources differ by a few years at the edges: UNESCO’s Silk Roads page, for one, runs Xuanzang’s travels to 654. This article uses James Legge’s 399 for Faxian and the 629 to 645 that Beal, Takakusu and Cunningham give for Xuanzang.

Faxian went for the monastic rules and stayed three years in Pataliputra

Legge translates Faxian’s book as the Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (《佛国记》, Fóguó jì). The monk’s name, Legge writes, means “Illustrious in the Law.” He left Chang’an because the Books of Discipline, the rules for monks, were incomplete in China. In northern India he found teachers passing the rules on by word of mouth, with no written copy to transcribe.

At the Mahayana monastery in Pataliputra he found a written copy of the Mahasanghika rules and stayed three years, learning Sanskrit books and speech and copying the text. One companion, Tao-ching in Legge’s spelling, watched the monks’ conduct in central India and decided to remain there for good. Faxian went on to Tamralipti, a port, where he spent two years copying sutras and drawing images, then two years in Sri Lanka, and sailed home. A storm on that voyage drove his ship for 13 days before it reached an island where the leak could be stopped.

Pataliputra under the Guptas, and what Xuanzang found there later

Faxian never names the reigning king. Singh writes that it must have been Chandragupta II, and how golden his age was is argued in the tuput piece on the Gupta golden age. What Faxian does describe is a city that impressed him. The cities and towns of Magadha, he wrote, were the greatest in the Middle Kingdom, as he called central India. The Mahayana and Hinayana monasteries beside Ashoka’s stupa held six or seven hundred monks between them, and scholars came from all quarters. Each year on the eighth day of the second month the city held a procession of images on about twenty decorated carts.

Heads of Vaishya families, the merchant caste, he reported, set up houses in the cities that dispensed charity and medicine. The poor, orphans, the disabled and the sick came for food and medicine, and doctors examined them. Of the Middle Kingdom, the country south of Mathura, he wrote that “The people are numerous and happy,” with no need to register their households. He also recorded that Chandalas lived apart from others and struck a piece of wood when they entered a town, so that people could avoid them. A pilgrim’s aim, Singh notes, was to show Chinese Buddhists the places of the Buddha’s life, so details of ordinary lives are few, and she calls his picture of Indian society idyllic and idealised.

In the seventh century Xuanzang reached the same city. In Beal’s translation he found only the old foundation walls, with monasteries, temples and stupas in ruins by the hundred and two or three still standing, and a small town of about 1,000 houses beside the Ganges.

Xuanzang gave a whole country a chapter

Book II of Xuanzang’s Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (《大唐西域记》, Dà Táng Xīyù jì, written Si-yu-ki in Beal’s translation) covers India as a whole. He gives its circuit as about 90,000 li and says it divides into some seventy countries, with a shape like a half moon. Towns had brick walls, and monasteries had a three-storey tower at each corner. The alphabet ran to 47 letters. Children began with a twelve-chapter primer and from about seven studied five subjects: grammar, arts and mechanics, medicine, logic, and the inner science of Buddhism. Each province, he wrote, had an official who kept written records of events.

Taxes, in his account, were light. Families were not registered, there was no forced labour, farmers on the royal estates paid a sixth of the produce, and labour for public works was paid in proportion to the work done.

He idealises in places, Singh points out, for instance in his list of punishments for breaking filial piety, which she links to his wish to stress a virtue Chinese readers prized. D. Devahuti, whom Singh also cites, finds him less biased than his reputation: he praised some non-Buddhist kings, faulted some Buddhist ones, and wrote at home in China, far from Harsha’s court. His meetings with the king and the great assemblies at Kannauj and Prayag are told in the tuput piece on Harshavardhana. Embassies were exchanged with China in Harsha’s reign, Singh adds, and the audience Xuanzang had with the king led to diplomatic relations between Kanauj and the Tang court.

Bodh Gaya, Lumbini and the town of Panini

His description of Bodh Gaya is specific enough to compare with the standing temple. In Beal’s translation a vihara east of the Bodhi tree is 160 or 170 feet high, built of blue brick covered in lime, with golden figures in niches on every storey. UNESCO gives the present Mahabodhi Temple as 50 metres high (about 164 feet) and dates it to the fifth or sixth century, among the earliest brick temples still standing in India. North of the enclosure he saw the Mahabodhi monastery, built by a former king of Sri Lanka and home to more than 1,000 monks. How that monastery came to be allowed is told in the piece on Samudragupta.

At Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, Faxian found the garden of the Buddha’s birth 50 li east of Kapilavastu, a city then empty except for some monks and a score or two of families. Xuanzang described a stone pillar built by Ashoka with a horse on top, broken in the middle. UNESCO lists the Ashoka pillar and its inscription as the proof of the birthplace and records that the pillar was discovered in 1896.

Salatura, in Gandhara, was the birthplace of the grammarian Panini according to Xuanzang, who reported a statue of him there. Cunningham suggested the site was Lahur, near Ohind, Singh writes. The grammar itself is the subject of the tuput piece on Panini.

Yijing came by sea and stayed at Nalanda for ten years

Yijing wrote in the first person. In 671, he says, he reached Canton and arranged passage on a Persian ship. Twenty days out he landed at Bhoga, on Sumatra, and spent six months learning Sanskrit grammar before going on by sea with the king’s help. Tamralipti came in 673 according to Takakusu’s text, and Nalanda held him for ten years, probably 675 to 685 by the translator’s reckoning. Yijing’s counts of its monks and his account of the daily routine are in the piece on Nalanda, so they are not repeated here.

For the voyage home he gathered Indian texts amounting to more than 500,000 verses, which he said would fill a thousand volumes in Chinese. He wrote the book while staying on Sumatra and sent it to China in 692. Its Chinese title is Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan (《南海寄归内法传》), a record of the inner law sent home from the southern sea, and Takakusu’s running heads call it A Record of Buddhist Practices. Back in China in 695, he was received warmly by Empress Wu. Between 700 and 712 he translated 56 works in 230 volumes.

One chapter is on Sanskrit grammar, written because Yijing hoped that proper study of the language would clear up difficulties in translation. The same chapter records a belief he heard in India, that the bodhisattva Manjusri was living in China, in a district called Pingzhou.

In a letter printed at the front of Takakusu’s translation, Max Müller put Yijing’s value in scholarly terms. Yijing gave the date of death of the grammarian Bhartrihari as about 651 to 652, and Müller called the record “a new sheet-anchor in the chronology of Sanskrit literature.”

A Chinese tablet at Bodh Gaya, and a letter in 654

A second book by Yijing gives brief lives of Chinese monks who went to India, and Singh counts 56 sketches in it. Beal’s summary of Yijing’s preface says the hardship of the route was made worse because no monasteries were set apart for Chinese monks. The same summary records that a monk he spells Taou-hi engraved a tablet in Chinese at the Mahabodhi temple giving an account of China, past and present.

Within 30 years of Xuanzang leaving India, at least eleven Chinese and Korean travellers had visited Nalanda, Ghosh’s guide says, citing Beal. Xuanzang himself kept up contact. In 654, from the Tz’u-en monastery in Chang’an, he answered a letter from Prajnadeva, a monk Singh places at Bodh Gaya and Ghosh calls a monk of Nalanda. Prajnadeva had sent a hymn and two rolls of fine cotton cloth. Xuanzang thanked him, recalled their debate at Kanyakubja, and sent a list of the scriptures he had lost in the Indus on the way home, asking for copies.

How the books were used to find the sites

Cunningham opened his 1871 Ancient Geography of India by saying the discovery of the Chinese pilgrims’ travels “has thrown such a flood of light upon this hitherto dark period.” He took Xuanzang as a chief guide and says Faxian “usually gives the bearings and distances” of his route. Ghosh’s Nalanda guide records the result: in the 1860s Cunningham identified the mounds at Bargaon as Nalanda from the distances and directions the pilgrims gave, together with inscriptions on images he found there. The Survey has dug there regularly since the 1915 to 1916 season. Faxian’s village of Nala, where Sariputra was born, may be Nalanda itself, Ghosh suggests, though Faxian mentions only a stupa there. Singh says Faxian does not mention Nalanda by name, a point that bears on when the monastery began.

India’s tentative-list submission applies the same method elsewhere. Cunningham identified Sravasti in 1863, and he proposed that the mound called Pakki Kuti is the stupa of Angulimala that the Chinese pilgrims saw, though another view reads it differently. At Kaushambi, the submission says Faxian found the Ghoshitarama monastery occupied by monks, while at Xuanzang’s visit more than ten monasteries stood in ruins and the monks numbered above 300. UNESCO’s Silk Roads programme says of the monks’ books that “their travel accounts are invaluable historical sources.”

UNESCO inscribed the 23 hectares of the Nalanda archaeological site on the World Heritage List in 2016.