Xuanzang

Chinese monk and religious leader

• Born: c. 602
• Birthplace: Luoyang, Henan Province, China
• Died: 664
• Place of death: Changan (now Xian), China

Xuanzang provided the Chinese with their first reliable informational about India, translated many classical Buddhist texts into the Chinese language, and founded the Weishi school of Chinese Buddhism.

At the age of thirteen, Xuanzang left home and entered a monastery. Initially, he became a monk as a means of securing a livelihood. Once there, however, he approached the study of the sutras with great dedication. By the time he was fifteen, he was recognized as a knowledgeable scholar in the Mahāyāna (or “great vehicle”) school of Buddhism, which taught that boddhisattvas (people who had reached enlightenment but postponed nirvana to aid others) who would help individuals find enlightenment. Because the last years of the Sui Dynasty saw terrible famine and civil war, Xuanzang was forced to move south to live in Sichuan Province, where he studied the theories of Hīnayāna (or “small vehicle”) Buddhism, which taught that each person must seek enlightenment without assistance.

With a fervent desire to learn to distinguish between truth and falsehood, Xuanzang went to various cities in China to study with several of the great Buddhist masters. He was increasingly troubled by the apparent contradictions and discrepancies among the alternative schools of thought. Not satisfied with the answers of the Chinese masters, he resolved to make a pilgrimage to India to study and meditate in the same places in which the Buddha had lived and worked. He also hoped to find and bring back as many sacred texts of Buddhism as possible, thereby establishing “true and genuine” interpretations of the Buddhist religion. He looked forward to sitting at the feet of the masters of Buddhist thought in India. He was inspired by the example of Faxian (Fa-hsien), a monk who had traveled to India two centuries earlier.

Taizong (T’ai-tsung; r. 627-649), the powerful emperor of the recently established Tang Dynasty (T’ang; 618-907), refused to grant Xuanzang a travel permit to leave China. However, the stubborn monk was determined to make the voyage. To prepare for the mountainous journey, he reportedly piled up tables and chairs to simulate mountains and practiced jumping from one pile to another. Monks observing his strange behavior wondered why he was jumping on furniture rather than meditating and reciting the sutras.

Life’s Work

In 629, a reoccurrence of famine conditions provided Xuanzang with the opportunity to travel westward. Joining hundreds of hungry refugees, he traveled along the Silk Road, crossing dry deserts and snowy mountains. His guide tried to murder him, and numerous times, he almost died of hunger and thirst. The Chinese police caught and detained him in the Taklimakan Desert. Initially, they planned to send him back to China, but when Xuanzang insisted that he would rather die than return, the commanding officer, a devout Buddhist, finally agreed to let him continue his pilgrimage. To avoid police outposts, Xuanzang took detours that were extremely treacherous.

Early Life

Xuanzang (shewan-tsahng) was raised in a family of scholars and civil servants. One grandfather had been president of the Imperial College of Beijing. Xuanzang’s immediate family, nevertheless, was poor because his father, Chen Hui, refused to serve as an official of the Sui Dynasty

After traveling more than a thousand miles (sixteen hundred kilometers), Xuanzang stopped at the oasis center of Turfan, on the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert. The king of Turfan, impressed with the monk’s learning, insisted that he stay and work as a teacher in the village. The king allowed him to leave only after he threatened a hunger strike. The king then gave him some money and letters of introduction to help him obtain safe passage through the various kingdoms along the way to India.

Traveling by horse, by camel, and by foot, Xuanzang next visited the oasis centers of Kucha, Aksu, and Kashgar (modern-day Kashi). He continued through the Turugart Pass and the towns of Tokmak, Tashkent, and Samarqand. He then headed eastward across the Hindu Kush Mountains of modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, until he entered Kashmir in northwest India. He then sailed down the Ganges River until he reached the holy places in and around Nepal in which the Buddha had lived. He was about five thousand miles (eight thousand kilometers) from his home in Xi’an, and his voyage had lasted a little more than two years. For the next several months, Xuanzang visited the holy sites and fervently meditated. He also began the difficult task of learning to read and communicate in the Sanskrit language.

During his twelve-year stay in India, Xuanzang spent much of his time at the Buddhist monastery at Nalanda, which at the time was the greatest center of Buddhist learning in the world. At Nalanda, he studied under a saintly monk named Silabhadra, whose mystical Buddhism would profoundly influence his thought. He also studied Hinduism and other Indian religious traditions. Both monks and laypeople in India learned to respect his scholarship and dedication of purpose. In several theological debates, he argued in favor of the Mahāyāna point of view. One debate lasted eighteen days. His disciples reported that he was victorious.

After a few years at Nalanda, Xuanzang made a long excursion to visit the extremities of India. He sailed to the city of Calcutta and then traveled along the eastern coast as far south as Madras. He wanted to visit the island of Sri Lanka, but conditions of civil war and famine made it impossible for him to go there. Next he crossed over the Indian mainland to Bombay, finally returning to Nalanda. During his trip, he collected Buddhist scriptures and had discussions with ascetic hermits. On more than one occasion, he had visions and other mystical experiences.

As his reputation for scholarship and piety spread far and wide, the powerful king of northern India, Harṣa, became his patron. Harṣa wanted him to stay in India but finally agreed to let him return to China in 643. Because the king provided him with considerable financial assistance, Xuanzang’s return to China was not nearly as difficult as his earlier voyage to India. He took with him twenty-two horses loaded with some 520 cases of Buddhist texts, relics, and religious images. Because the return trip was not illegal, he was able to take a more direct route than the way he came.

When Xuanzang arrived at the Tang capital of Xi’an in 645, he had been gone about sixteen years. By this time, the Tang government had managed to establish conditions of relative stability and prosperity, especially when compared with the violence and poverty of the latter years of the Sui Dynasty. Xuanzang received an enthusiastic welcome. Emperor Taizong, was so impressed with his accounts of the lands of the west that he offered him a position as a high official. Xuanzang declined the offer, for he was determined to devote the his life to translating, writing, and meditating.

At the request of the emperor, Xuanzang agreed to write about the cultures and politics of the lands he had visited. The work he produced, Datang xiyouji (c. 650; Buddhist Records of the Western World, 1884), has long been recognized as one of the great classics of Chinese literature. It provides information about Xuanzang’s life in India and during his travels and is one of the major sources of information about the Medieval History/Middle Ages of China, Central Asia, and especially India. Archaeologists frequently carry the work with them when working on digs. All educated Chinese have heard about the travels of Xuanzang through historical and fictional works. Hundreds of novels, stories, and plays have been written about his search for truth and enlightenment, including the popular Xiyouji (c. 1570-c. 1580, oldest surviving edition, 1592; Journey to the West, 1977-1983) by Wu Cheng’en, in which a magical monkey king helps Xuanzang.

Xuanzang brought back almost six hundred Buddhist texts from India. For the rest of his life, he diligently worked at translating these texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, eventually translating about seventy-three of them. The difficult work of translation allowed Xuanzang to become an outstanding authority on the Buddhist scriptures called the TipitŃaka (compiled c. 250 b.c.e.; English translation in Buddhist Scriptures, 1913), or “three baskets,” so that he was named the TipitŃaka Master. Because these scriptures were commonly called the law, some Buddhist writers refer to him as the Master of the Law.

By the time of his return to China, Xuanzang was firmly committed to the mystical school of Indian thought known as Yogācāra. In essence, this school held that the material world does not really exist but is simply a representation of the mind. In China, the doctrine was called weishi (meaning “consciousness only”). Xuanzang maintained that it accurately expressed the Buddha’s authentic teachings, providing a true path for individuals to find enlightenment and escape the cycle of birth and rebirth. He translated and compiled a collection of essential writings about the topic, Cheng weishi lun (659; English translation, 1973).

Xuanzang’s scholastic and idealistic approach to Buddhism had only limited appeal to the pragmatic Chinese people, and other approaches seemed more compatible with their religious and philosophical concerns. For this reason, the weishi school almost disappeared from China within a century after Xuanzang’s death. However, his Japanese disciple, Dōshō, carried the weishi doctrine to Japan, where it was called Hossō and became the most influential school of Japanese Buddhism during the seventh and eighth centuries.

During his last years, Xuanzang continued to work in Xi’an under the patronage of the Tang emperors. To house Xuanzang’s collection of Buddhist works, Emperor Gaozong (Kao-tsung, r. 650-683) in 652 built the Wild Goose Pagoda, which still survives as a landmark of Chinese architecture. As Xuanzang’s health deteriorated, he told his followers that his work was finished, so that there was no need for him to stay any longer. Just before his death in 664, his followers reported that he mumbled that everything was illusionary, concluding, “Unreality itself is unreal.” After he died, the emperor honored his memory by canceling all of his audiences for three days.

Significance

Xuanzang was an outstanding explorer, writer, translator, and thinker. His pilgrimage to India was unquestionably one of the great epic voyages of the ancient world, and his descriptive account of the pilgrimage is widely acknowledged as one of the most important primary sources of the period. By translating numerous Buddhist writings from India, he greatly enriched Chinese thought. His translations also helped preserve many works that might have otherwise perished. Although his weishi school of Buddhism has never attracted large numbers of adherents, it is nevertheless recognized as one of the important currents of Buddhist thought.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Richard. Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. A noted journalist discusses both his own experiences and those of Xuanzang in the same places.

Ch’en, Kenneth. Buddhism in China. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964. A readable and helpful historical account that includes a concise summary of Xuanzang’s career.

Devahuti, D. Unknown Hsuan-Tsang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. A collection of English translations of Xuanzang’s translations into Chinese, with commentary and a biographical sketch.

Grousset, René. In the Footsteps of the Buddha. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Routledge and Sons, 1932. Rev. ed. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971. A very interesting and scholarly biography that places Xuanzang in the context of Tang history and Buddhist philosophy, with excellent illustrations.

Hui-li. The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang. Translated by Samuel Beal. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1911. Written by one of Xuanzang’s students soon after his death, this is an important primary source for obtaining information about the man and his religious ideas.

Hui-li. The Life of Hsüan-tsang. Translated by Li Yung-hsi. Beijing: Chinese Buddhist Association, 1959. Although perhaps difficult to locate, this is a readable, direct translation of the biography written by Hui-li. Paperback edition includes reproductions of a traditional painting of Xuanzang and a fourteenth century woodcut showing him translating scriptures. Limited footnotes assist in identifying ancient place-names with modern counterparts.

Waley, Arthur. The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces. London: Allen and Unwin, 1952. An interesting biography of medium length that emphasizes Xuanzang’s religious ideas.

Watters, Thomas. On Yuan Chwang’s Travels in India. New York: AMS Press, 1971. A scholarly discussion of the places that Xuanzang visited, containing very little about his ideas.

Wriggins, Sally. Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. A well-written biography that incorporates modern scholarship, with detailed endnotes, bibliography, index, glossary, and many illustrations. Highly recommended.

Wu Cheng’en. The Journey to the West. 4 vols. Translated by Anthony C. Yu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. A famous sixteenth century folk novel known as Monkey, which was inspired by Xuanzang’s voyage and experiences in India.