China’s Buddhist Explorers, Part One

Faxian’s 15,000 km route

Imagine Columbus were a humble pilgrim, rather than an intrepid explorer. Forsaking conquest for respect, he would have truly given Europe a New World. But then aboriginal Americans never had the foresight to send their priests to strange lands. The real Indians did; King Ashoka’s emissaries brought the jeweled lotus of Buddhism to China in the 3^rd century BCE, inspiring Chinese Buddhists to return to the land of its origin centuries later. One of these pilgrims, Faxian, left records of his travels, and dedicated his life to uniting the world through faith by example, not compulsion.

Indian Buddhist missionaries set a courageous precedent, depending on their burnished spirits to protect their vulnerable bodies. In 386 CE, Kumarajiva made it to Chang’an, today’s Xi’an, but not before a long stretch in a Turpan prison, sentenced on mistrust alone. But bars couldn’t restrain his new teaching, the Diamond Sutra, which led him to the court of King Yaoxing, and made him a Buddhist superstar in China.

Inspired, and inflamed by thoughts of all the sacred texts still hidden beyond the mountains, Faxian the monk left Chang’an in 399 CE, on a fifteen-year odyssey that would take him through the teeth of Central Asia, across the top of the subcontinent, then on down to Sri Lanka and Java.

He set out with with four fellow monks, who soon found themselves in trackless Gobi wastes, where even today a GPS and Land Rover are hardly guarantee of safe passage. The austerities of monastic life no doubt steeled them for suffering, but the party emerged a man short, lost to thirst.

The only reward for crossing was the terrible prospect of the Kunlun and Tianshan Mountain ranges. In the foothills, their only defenses against regular brigand-attacks were their impoverished circumstances, and the silver tongue of Faxian, who had once persuaded a band of starving robbers not to plunder the temple granary. In the freezing heights, they depended not on North Face and freeze-dried ready meals but the aid of people much more given to succoring monks in need than today’s populace.

It was an emaciated, frost-bitten band of monks who at last scrambled down from the Karakoram Mountains into the Indus River valley. For a devout Chinese Buddhist, here was the Promised Land. Monks enjoyed the respect and adulation usually reserved for professional athletes today. A passage from Faxian’s A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms makes the case:

An honored place is made for monks in central India, where the Kings are firm believers in that Law. When they make their offerings to a community of monks, they take off their royal caps, and along with their relatives and ministers, supply them with food with their own hands.

Besides his rock-star status, Faxian enjoyed tracing the footsteps of the Enlightened One, in a land where another stupa commemorating one of His holy acts never lay more than a day’s journey away. The site where He had offered His flesh for a dove pursued by a hawk, His body for a hungry tiger, His head for an alms-seeker, on these places and more Faxian prayed reverently, always adding to his growing store of rare Buddhist texts.

Faxian also found time to record secular aspects of life in India, at the time self-dubbed “the Middle Kingdom”:

In it the cold and heat are finely tempered, and there is neither hoarfrost nor snow. The people are numerous and happy; they have not to register their households, or attend to any magistrates and their rules; only those who cultivate the royal land have to pay a portion of the grain from it. If they want to go, they go; if they want to stay on, they stay.

The king governs without decapitation or other corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined, lightly or heavily according to the circumstances of each case. Even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion, they only have their right hands cut off. The king’s body-guards and attendants all have salaries. Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions and garlic.

All the poor and destitute in the country, orphans, widowers, and childless men, maimed people and cripples, and all who are diseased, go to those houses, and are provided with every kind of help, and doctors examine their diseases. They get the food and medicines which their cases require, and are made to feel at ease; and when they feel better, they go away of themselves.

Faxian travelled this enlightened realm some three years, before departing for Sri Lanka and another two-year hunt. From there, the trip back to China on a merchant ship entailed almost as much privation as the overland route to India, with storms, thirst, and pirates regularly diminishing his chances of safe return. Eight months later, he finally did, and spent the remainder of his life translating his trove of scriptures from Sanskrit to Chinese, a spiritual gift to his people more precious than a Spanish galleon full of gold.

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