THE CHINESE PILGRIM 139
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!
