Leaving Without Permission
Xuanzang was born in 602 near Luoyang into a family of Confucian officials, and became a monk in his teens alongside an elder brother. Studying the Chinese Buddhist canon, he found the translations inconsistent and the doctrinal disputes among Chinese schools impossible to settle from the available texts, particularly on questions of consciousness and the nature of enlightenment. He concluded that the answers lay in the Sanskrit originals, and applied for permission to travel west. The new Tang government, insecure on its frontiers, refused.
He went anyway, in 629, slipping past the border garrisons. His own account and the biography written by his disciple Huili describe near death from thirst in the Gobi after losing his water, detention by the king of Turfan who tried to keep him and finally became his patron, an avalanche-swept crossing of the Tian Shan that killed members of his party, and encounters with bandits. He travelled through Central Asia, met the Western Turk khagan, passed through Bactria and Gandhara, and entered India by way of Kashmir.
Sixteen Years on the Road
He spent years at Nalanda, the great monastic university in Magadha, studying Sanskrit, logic and Yogacara philosophy under the aged abbot Silabhadra. He then travelled the subcontinent for further study, from Bengal to the Deccan, visiting the sites of the Buddha's life and the caves and stupas of a religion already declining in parts of its homeland. He became famous enough that the emperor Harsha of Kanauj summoned him, and he is said to have taken part in a great public debate, defending Mahayana positions before an assembly of scholars.
His account of the journey, the Record of the Western Regions, was compiled in 646 at imperial request and is one of the most valuable sources in Asian history. He described kingdoms, climates, crops, currencies, monastic populations and local customs with a precision unusual in any period. Nineteenth-century archaeologists used it as a field guide: Alexander Cunningham and others located Nalanda, Sarnath and other lost sites by following his distances and directions. He also brought back relics, statues, and six hundred and fifty-seven manuscripts.
The Translation Bureau and the Legend
The illegal departure was forgiven. Emperor Taizong received him in 645, pressed him to take up a government career, and when he declined funded a translation bureau instead. For the last nineteen years of his life Xuanzang directed a team of scholars and copyists producing Chinese versions of some seventy-five works, more than a thousand fascicles in all. His renderings were more exact and more literal than earlier ones, and he introduced conventions for transliterating terms that had no Chinese equivalent rather than borrowing Daoist vocabulary as his predecessors had.
He also founded a school, the Faxiang, based on the Yogacara philosophy he had gone to India to master. It did not long survive him in China, where more devotional and practical traditions won out. His fame took another route: by the sixteenth century his journey had been transformed into Journey to the West, a comic fantasy in which a timid monk is escorted by a rebellious monkey king and a pig-demon. The novel made him immortal in East Asia, at the price of burying the meticulous scholar under a legend.
