THE CHINESE PILGRIM
Amongst Indian historical documents there is none more fascinating than the books of their travels written by the early Chinese pilgrims. Of these the two now best known to us are those of Fa-Hian, who came to India about A.D. 400, and Hiouen Tsang, about A.D. 640. Hiouen Tsang, owing partly to the accident that his life was afterwards written by his disciples, appears to us as a personality, as the head and master of a large religious following, as a saint as well as a scholar, a monk as well as a traveller. But Fa-Hian is a lonelier, more impersonal figure. Monk and pilgrim as he was, it is rather the geographer that impresses us in him. Grave and sparing of words, he tells us little or nothing of himself. For all we know, he may have been the very first of the travellers who came to India on the task of Buddhistic research. From the surprise with which he is everywhere received and the complimentary exclamations that he records, it would appear indeed as if this had been so. On the other hand, from the quietness with which he comes and goes, from his silence about royal favours, and his own freedom from self-consciousness, it would seem as if the sight of Chinese visitors had not been rare in the India of that period, though the errand on which he and his party had come might single them out for some special degree of reverence and interrogation. "How great must be the devotion of these priests," said the people in the Punjab, "that they should have come thus to learn the law from the very extremity of the earth!" And yet frequent references to "the Clergy of Reason" in Kosala and in the south, these Clergy of Reason having apparently been Taoist monks on pilgrimage, involve a curious contradiction in this matter. Hiouen Tsang's is really a work of autobiography, but Fa-Hian's is rather the abstract of a statement made before some learned society, perhaps a university in the south of China, and countersigned by them.
In a certain year, with certain companions, Fa-Hian set out to make se^irch in India for the Laws and Precepts of Religion, "because he had been distressed in Chhang'an (Sian in Shen-si, evidently his native province) to observe the Precepts and the theological works on the point of being lost, and already disfigured by lacunae." Such are the quiet words with which the narrative begins. So colourless can be the phrases in which the passion of a life is stated. From that moment when Fa-Hian set out, to that other day when " at the end of the summer rest, they went out to meet Fa-Hian the traveller," who had surmounted obstacles incredible, and borne difficulties innumerable, was to be fifteen long years! His book consists of some forty short chapters or paragraphs, each one dealing as a rule with a separate province or country. Of it he himself says:—
"The present is a mere summary. Not having been heard by the Masters hitherto, he (Fa-Hian) casts not his eyes retrospectively on details. He crossed the sea and hath returned, after having overcome every manner of fatigue, and has enjoyed the happiness of receiving many high and noble favours. He has been in dangers, and has escaped them. And now therefore he puts upon the bamboo what has happened to him, anxious to communicate to the wise what he hath seen and heard."
We can hardly doubt that. this is a form of superscription, offering his paper on his travels to the consideration of some organised body of scholars.
Those travels themselves had occupied fifteen years. From the leaving of his native province of Chhang'an till his crossing of the Indus, "the river in the west," was a six years' journey. He spent six years in India itself, including two in Orissa. "And finally, reckoning apparently two years spent in Ceylon, he was three years on the voyage home. Each stage of the journey is described, from the time of leaving Chhang'an. The kingdoms which he has traversed, he says in closing, number at least thirty. But, though the provinces south and west of Khotan are called "India of the North," he scarcely seems to think that he has reached India proper till he comes to Mathura. This he treats almost as if it were a capital. He seizes the moment of his arrival there to give one of his gem-like pictures of the whole country and its civilisation. He describes the Government, the freedom with which men come and go, untroubled by passport regulations, and the self-restraint with which justice is administered and the criminal punished. We must remember that these were the times of Vikramaditya, said to have been " of Ujjain." Was Ujjain, perhaps, the name of all Western India, and Mathura its metropolis? Compared with Mathura, Pataliputra appears relatively unimportant. It was older, grayer perhaps, and more imposing. It had been "the capital of Asoka." Its palaces were still marvellous. Ecclesiastically, too, it was strong as well as noted. Royal delegates were posted there from each of the provinces. But commercially, and perhaps even politically also, we feel that the centre of power in India was at the time of I^a-Hian's visit at Mathura. From this he makes his way, by Samkassa and Kanauj, into the heart of Buddha's own country — Sravasti, Kapilavastu, Kusinagara, and so on, down to Ganga, a chain of sites that by the painstaking labours of so many archaeologists have now been in great measure recovered. From Ganga he returns to Pataliputra, and thence makes his way to Benares and Kausambi. Again making Pataliputra his headquarters, he seems to have spent three years in the Buddha country learning Sanskrit and copying manuscripts. And finally he sailed down the Ganges, through the kingdom of Champa, and came to Tamluk, or Tamralipti, where he stayed two years. When he left Tamralipti in a large ship for the south-west, he appears to have reckoned himself, though he was yet to spend two years in Ceylon, as already on the return journey.
The journey, as he describes it, constitutes an abstract of all that concerns Buddhism, and quietly ignores everything else in the country. "Brahmans and heretics" is Fa-Hian's comprehensive term for Hinduism in all its non-Buddhistic phases. We are able to gather a great deal nevertheless about the state of the country from his pages. In the first place we learn —as we do with still greater emphasis later from Hiouen Tsang —that to a learned Chinese, who had made an exhaustive study of Buddhism in Gandhara, and the kingdoms of the north-west frontier, India proper, or "India of the Middle," as he calls it, was still the country in which to seek for original and authentic images. Traversing Gandhara, Swat, Darada, Udyana, Takshasila, Purushapura, and Nagara (probably Kabul), it was not in any of these, but in Tamralipti that our traveller spent two years copying books and painting images. Again; already, at the time of Fa-Hian's visit, the old city of Rajgir, he tells us, is "entirely desert and uninhabited." It follows that the carvings and statuary in which to this day that site is rich are to a great extent of a school of sculpture which had grown, flourished, and decayed prior to A.D. 400. This in itself is a fact of immense importance. We constantly find in the travels that sacred places are marked by chapels, monasteries, and stupas." Now a chapel of Buddha is undoubtedly an image-house. Nor is Fa-Hian himself entirely without feeling for the historical aspect of that Buddhistic sculpture which is one of the chosen objects of his study. He speaks always as if images were common enough in Buddhism, but he tells us that "the first of all images of Buddha, and that which men in aftertimes have copied," was a certain bull's head carved in sandal wood, which was made by Prasenajit,king of Kosala, at the time when Buddha was in the Tusita heaven preaching to his mother. The difference between an image and an emblem does not seem here to be very clearly apprehended, but the statement shows once for all that men in the fourth and fifth centuries looked to the eastern provinces, and to the country of Buddha's own activity, as the historic source of Buddhistic statuary. Again, when travelling in ihe kingdom of Tho-ly —north-east of the Indus, east of Afghanistan, and south of the Hindu Kush; or, as has been suggested, Darada of the Dards —he tells us that there was once an arhat in this kingdom who sent a certain sculptor to the Tusita heaven to study the stature and features of Maitreya Bodhisattva. Three times the man went, and when he came down he made an image of heroic size, about eight English feet in height, which on festival days was wont to become luminous, and to which neighbouring kings rendered periodic worship. "This image," adds the pilgrim, in the far-away tone of one who speaks on hearsay, "still exists in the same locality." It was after the making of this statue, he further tells us, that the Buddhist missionaries began to come from the far side of the Indus, with their collections of the books and of the Sacred Precepts; and the image was erected three hundred years after the Mahanirvana. Here we learn a great deal. In the first place, when Buddhism crossed the Indus, three hundred years after the death of Buddha, it was already the religion of the Bodhisattvas. Obviously there had been solitary saints, and perhaps even communities of monastics, without the books before—or how should there have been an arhat to transport a sculptor three times to the Tusita Heaven?—but there was a sudden accession of Buddhistic culture at a date three hundred years after the death of the Master, and this culture was Mahayanist in character. Thus the Mahayana doctrine with its fully- equipped pantheon, its images, and its collections of books, to be declared canonical under Kanishka purported to come, like the Hinayana, from India proper, or, as Fa-Hian calls it, Madhyadesa. Magadha, Kosala, and Vaisali, then, may claim the honour of having initiated Buddhistic art as fully and truly as Buddhistic thought.
Further, it is clear that in Magadha itself the great ages of sculpture were felt to be already past. Talking of Pataliputra, which had been the capital of Asoka, "the palaces in the town have walls," says our traveller, "of which the stones were put together by genii. The sculptures and the carved work which adorn the windows are such as cannot be equalled in the present age. They still exist." We who have seen the work done under Moghul emperors in marble, and the pierced sandstones of modern Benares, might not, had we seen them also, have been so ready as Fa-Hian to attribute a supernatural origin to the windows of the Asokan palaces. But the fact remains than an unimpeachable witness has assured us of the greatness and beauty of such work in Magadha, with the reputation of being ancient at the beginning of the fifth century A.D.
The great difficulty in the path of Fa-Hian was the scarcity of written documents. Everywhere he inquired for books, he tells us, but everywhere he found that the precepts were handed down by memory from master to disciple, each book having its given professor. At last, in the great temple of Victory in the Buddha country he found what he wanted, and there he stayed three years to copy. This is a most important light on many questions besides that with which it deals. It accounts, as nothing else could have done, for the tenacity with which the pure doctrine of Buddhism seems to have been held for so many centuries. The concentration of energy necessary for the carrying out of such a task as the memorising of a vast literature explains the gravity and decorum of the Orders so long maintained. "The decency, the gravity, the piety of the clergy," meaning the Buddhis't monks,
Fa-Hian takes several occasions to say, "are admirable. They cannot be described." It explains the tendency of Buddhistic monasteries to become universities. It explains the synthetic tendencies of the faith, which in the time of Kanishka could already include eighteen schools of doctrine declared to be mutually compatible, and not defiant. It also explains, turning to another subject altogether, why the first written version of the old Puranas should always so evidently be an edited version of an ancient original. It visualises for us the change from Pali to Sanskrit, and it justifies the sparseness of written archives in matters of Indian history. These were evidently memorised. On this point indeed Fa-Hian constantly tells us that kings granting lands to the Buddhistic orders engrave their deeds on iron, and we can only feel that as long as this was so, their non-survival is not to be wondered at. It must have been at a comparatively later period that brass and copper came to be used for a similar purpose, with the desired effect of permanence. Curiously enough, in Tamralipti there is no mention of difficulty regarding manuscripts. Nor again in Ceylon. In the last-named kingdom we know that the writing down had begun at least two or three centuries before the visit of Fa-Hian, and he would seem to have benefited by this fact. We gather then that as Magadha and Kosala were the source of Buddhistic doctrine in its different phases, and the source of successive waves of Buddhistic symbolism, so also they were the first region to feel the impulse of a literary instead of a verbal transmission of the canonical scriptures.
The difference between "India of the North"—or the Gandharan provinces beyond the Indus—and India proper in all matters of learning and the faith comes out very prominently in the pages of Fa-Hian, and ought to refute sufficiently all who imagine Gandhara as possessed of a culture in any way primary and impulsive, instead of entirely derivative and passive.
As if forecasting our need on this very point, the pilgrim particularly notes that on reaching India proper (and apparently in the great temple of Chhi'honan or Victory in Kosala) his last remain- ing companion, Tao-chhing, when he "beheld the law of the Shaneen, and all the clergy grave, decorous, and conducting themselves in a manner greatly to be admired, reflected, with a sigh, that the inhabitants of the frontiers of the kingdom of Thsin (China) were deficient in the Precepts and transgressed their duties; and said that if hereafter he could become Buddha, he wished that he might not be reborn in the country of the frontiers; on this account he remained, and returned not. Fa-Hian, whose first desire was that the precepts should be diffused and should penetrate into the land of Han, returned therefore alone."
About this same "India of the North" we have still more detail. The pre-Buddhistic Buddhism, which undoubtedly existed and was represented in Buddha's own day by his cousin Devadatta, was much more living in the Gandharan provinces at the time of Fa-Hian's journey than in India proper. Also the Birth Stories had become the romance of these provinces, and there were stupas there to the almsgiving of the eyes and of the head, to the giving of his own flesh by the Bodhisattva to redeem a dove, and to the making himself a meal for the starving tigress. We cannot help distinguishing between those countries whose Buddhism was Hinayana and those in which it was Mahayana, as more or less anciently the goal of Buddhist missions. And we note that Udyana, whose name seems to indicate that it had been a royal residence, perhaps the home-county, as it were, of the Kushan dynasty, was entirely Mahayana, and is mentioned under the name of Ujjana, as one of the northern tirthas in the Mahabharata. It would appear, indeed, that when the Himavant began to be parcelled out into a series of Mahabharata stations sometime under the later Guptas, the undertaking was in direct and conscious succession to an earlier appropriation of the regions further west, as stations of the Jatakas, or Birth stories of Buddha. We ought not, in the attempt to follow up some of the thousand and one threads of interest that our traveller leaves for us, to forget the one or two glimpses of himself that he vouch-safes us. Never can one who has read it forget the story of his visit to the cave that he knew on the hill of Gridhrakuta, where Buddha used to meditate, in Old Rajgir : "Fa-Hian, having purchased in the new town perfumes, flowers, and oil lamps, hired two aged bhikshus to conduct him to the grots and to the hill Khi-che. Having made an oblation of the perfumes and the flowers, the lamps increased the brilliance. Grief and emotion affected him even to tears. He said: 'Formerly in this very place was Buddha. Here he taught the Sheou-leng-yan.^ Fa-Hian, unable to behold Buddha in life, has but witnessed the traces of his sojourn. Still, it is something to have recited the Sheou-leng-yan before the cave, and to have dwelt there one night.' "
But Fa-Hian, enthusiast as he was, and capable of extreme exertions in the cause of the Faith and China, was not this alone. There was also in that grave and modest nature a chord that vibrated to the thought of home. "He longed ardently," he says, when he had already reached the South of China, " to see Chhang'^in again, but, that which he had at heart being a weighty matter, he halted in the South where the masters published the Sacred Books and the Precepts." Thus he excuses himself for a brief delay on the way back to his native province. But if he feels thus when he has already landed on Chinese shores, what must have been his longing while still in foreign lands? In Ceylon, seated before the blue jasper image of Buddha, perhaps at Anuradhapura, he pauses to tell us:—
"Many years had now elapsed since Fa-Hian left the land of Han. The people with 'whom he
1 The things which are difficult to discriniinii'e from one another. mingled were men of foreign lands. The hills, the rivers, the plants, the trees, everything that had met his eyes was strange to him. And what was more, those who had begun the journey with him were now separated from him. Some had remained behind, and some had died. Ever reflecting on the past, his heart was thoughtful and dejected. Suddenly, while at the side of this jasper figure, he beheld a merchant presenting in homage to it a fan of white lute-string of the country of Tsin. Without anyone's perceiving it, this excited so great an emotion that the tears flowed and filled his eyes."
Nor can we forget the simple and beautiful counter-signature which seems to have been affixed by the learned body to whom he presented it, to Fa-Hian's written summary of his travels. After telling how they met Fa-Hian and discoursed with him, interrogating him, and after telling how his words inspired trust, his good faith lent confidence to his recital, the scribe of the Chinese University, or Secretary to the Imperial Geographical Society, as it may have been ("the masters" in any case he calls them), ends thus:—
"They were touched with these words. They were touched to behold such a man : they observed amongst themselves that a very few had indeed expatriated themselves for the sake of the Doctrine, but no one had ever forgotten Self in quest of the law, as Fa-Hian had done. One must know the conviction which truth produces, otherwise one cannot partake of the zeal which produces earnestness. Without merit and without activity, nothing is achieved. On accomplishing aught, with merit and with activity, how shall one be abandoned to oblivion? To lose what is esteemed—to esteem what mankind forgot—Oh!"