玄奘

玄奘 Xuánzàng (602 to 664 CE) was born near Luoyang into a learned family and entered the monastic life young, ordained as a full monk in his early twenties. Studying the Buddhist texts then available in Chinese, he grew troubled by their contradictions and gaps: the translations were partial, the doctrines disputed, and no one in China could resolve the disagreements because the source texts were not there. He resolved to do what almost no one had done and survived to tell of: travel to India, the homeland of the religion, and bring back the scriptures in their original Sanskrit.

The early Tang court had forbidden private travel beyond the frontier. In 629 CE Xuanzang left Chang'an (长安, modern Xi'an) without authorization, defying the ban, and made his way west along the edges of the 丝绸之路 Sīchóu zhī Lù, the Silk Road. He crossed the Gobi, nearly dying of thirst when he lost his water in the desert; passed through the oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, where the devout king of Gaochang (高昌) tried to keep him by force and finally let him go laden with supplies and letters of introduction; climbed the Tian Shan mountains, losing companions to cold; and skirted the great lakes of Central Asia before turning south through the passes into the Indian subcontinent.

The outward journey took years and covered, by the reckoning of his own account, thousands of li across some of the most forbidding terrain in Asia. He travelled as a scholar-pilgrim, debating doctrine in the kingdoms he passed through, gathering relics and texts, and recording what he saw with a precision that would later make his report one of the most valuable sources for the history of seventh-century India and Central Asia.

The destination at the heart of the journey was 那烂陀寺 Nàlàntuó Sì, the monastic university of Nalanda in the kingdom of Magadha (in modern Bihar), then the foremost center of Buddhist learning in the world. Nalanda housed thousands of monks and students, vast libraries, and the leading teachers of the Mahayana philosophical schools. Xuanzang studied there for several years under the aged abbot 戒贤 Jièxián (Śīlabhadra), mastering Sanskrit and the difficult 唯识 wéishí (Yogācāra, "Consciousness-Only") philosophy that would become the core of his life's teaching.

He became one of the most accomplished scholars Nalanda had produced, Chinese or Indian. Travelling on pilgrimage to the sacred sites of the Buddha's life and continuing his studies across the subcontinent, he earned a reputation that reached the great king 戒日王 Jièrì Wáng (Harsha), the dominant ruler of northern India, who became his patron. At a grand assembly convened by Harsha, Xuanzang is said to have defended his positions in open debate against the assembled scholars of rival schools, and to have prevailed, a foreign monk crowned victor in the intellectual arena of Indian Buddhism itself.

When he chose to return home, both Harsha and the monks of Nalanda pressed him to stay. He refused. He had not come for honors but for the texts, and his purpose was to carry them back to China where they were needed. He set out eastward in the early 640s with his collection of manuscripts, relics, and Buddha images, recrossing the mountains and deserts he had survived on the way out.

Xuanzang returned to 长安 Chang'an in 645 CE after sixteen years, carrying 657 Sanskrit texts. He had left as a fugitive from the travel ban; he returned a celebrity. The emperor 唐太宗 Táng Tàizōng, who had once forbidden such journeys, received him with honor and pressed him to write an account of the lands he had seen, and to leave the monastery for government service. Xuanzang declined the office but accepted imperial patronage for the one task that mattered to him: translation.

For the remaining nineteen years of his life he directed a state-supported translation bureau, working with teams of assistant monks who checked his renderings, polished the Chinese, and copied the results. He translated some seventy-five works in well over a thousand fascicles, including the monumental six-hundred-fascicle 大般若经 Dà Bōrě Jīng (the great Prajñāpāramitā corpus) and the foundational texts of the Yogācāra school. His translations were so precise, so careful to preserve the structure of the Sanskrit, that they marked a turning point in Chinese Buddhist scholarship: scholars distinguish the "new translations" (新译 xīnyì) of Xuanzang's era from the freer "old translations" (旧译 jiùyì) of earlier figures such as 鸠摩罗什 Jiūmóluóshí (Kumārajīva).

The school he founded on these texts, the 法相宗 Fǎxiàng Zōng (the "Dharma-Characteristics" or Consciousness-Only school), was philosophically rigorous but did not long survive him as an independent tradition in China; its difficulty worked against it, and the more accessible Chan and Pure Land schools came to dominate. Yet his translations entered the permanent canon, and a great deal of the technical Buddhist vocabulary still active in Chinese passed through his exacting hand. To house the precious manuscripts he had carried home, the 大雁塔 Dàyàn Tǎ (Great Wild Goose Pagoda) was built in Chang'an, where it still stands in modern Xi'an.

At the emperor's request, Xuanzang dictated an account of his travels, the 大唐西域记 Dà Táng Xīyù Jì (Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang), completed in 646 CE. It describes well over a hundred kingdoms, towns, and regions across Central Asia, India, and the lands between, recording their geography, climate, customs, languages, rulers, and the state of Buddhism in each, with a sober, observational eye that has made it indispensable to historians.

For the history of early medieval India in particular, the Record is irreplaceable. India's own traditions left little continuous secular history, and Xuanzang's careful notes have allowed archaeologists to locate and identify sites that would otherwise be lost, including the ruins of Nalanda itself, excavated in modern times with his account in hand. His description of the great Buddha statues of 巴米扬 Bāmǐyáng (Bamiyan), carved into the cliffs of what is now Afghanistan, is among the earliest detailed records of monuments later destroyed. The pilgrim who set out to recover scripture left, almost incidentally, one of the finest pieces of travel writing and field observation in the premodern world.

The real journey was extraordinary enough to become a legend, and over the centuries that is exactly what happened. Storytellers, dramatists, and popular religion seized on the image of the lone monk crossing a wilderness full of dangers, and embroidered it. By the Song and Yuan dynasties the historical pilgrimage had acquired supernatural companions and demon-perils in oral and theatrical retellings, and in the Ming dynasty the novelist 吴承恩 Wú Chéng'ēn shaped the accumulated legend into the great comic novel 西游记 Xīyóujì (Journey to the West), one of the Four Great Classical Novels.

In the novel the monk appears as 唐僧 Táng Sēng (the Tang Monk), also called 唐三藏 Táng Sānzàng, pure-hearted and devout but physically helpless, forever being captured by demons who wish to eat his flesh for immortality. His strength comes from his disciples: the Monkey King 孙悟空 Sūn Wùkōng, the pig-spirit 猪八戒 Zhū Bājiè, and the river-ogre 沙僧 Shā Sēng, who guard him through eighty-one ordeals to fetch the scriptures from the West. The fictional monk is a softened, almost comic figure; the historical Xuanzang was a man of formidable will who crossed deserts alone and out-argued the scholars of India.

The two now live side by side in Chinese culture. 玄奘 is honored as one of the greatest scholars and translators in Chinese history and as a symbol of dedication to a distant goal pursued against every obstacle; 唐僧 is the gentle, well-meaning pilgrim of the most beloved adventure story in the language. It is a rare case of a real person becoming, simultaneously, a monument of serious history and a character in a children's fantasy, each version keeping something true about him: the unbreakable resolve, and the sacred errand to the West.