Journeys on the Silk Road (13 page)

News of such horses and other desirable goods prompted moves to establish the trade routes that became the Silk Road and fostered exchanges between these distant lands. Over time, missions were sent and garrisons established, including at Dunhuang, to protect the growing commerce. Zhang Qian is pictured in a mural at the Mogao Caves taking leave of Emperor Wudi. His groundbreaking journey helped forge an overland route between China and the West—and laid the path for Buddhism’s arrival from India. The path from the Himalayan foothills through Central Asia and into China was circuitous, but the vast mountain ranges between China and India posed formidable obstacles to a more direct route. As Buddhism meandered into China, a unique form of art developed as the religion bumped up against different cultures along the way. The art was a tangible expression of the Buddhist desire to be freed from the cycle of rebirth and suffering.

Buddhism split into two branches as it traveled. Theravada Buddhism, which emphasizes individual enlightenment, took hold in Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka. Mahayana Buddhism, which asserts everyone can become a Buddha and seeks to free all beings from suffering, became dominant in north Asia, including Tibet, Korea, Japan, and China. The Mahayana practitioner strives over many lifetimes to become first a bodhisattva, a wise, compassionate being who leads others to enlightenment, and ultimately a fully awakened Buddha.

Central to Buddhism is the idea of karma, a cosmic chain of cause and effect whereby everything a person thinks, says or does leaves a “seed” that will ripen in the future. Negative seeds ripen as suffering and virtuous seeds as happiness and, ultimately, enlightenment. Therefore performing virtuous, or meritorious, actions is imperative for a Buddhist. A virtuous act includes the making—or sponsoring the making—of holy images and objects. And the more that are created, the greater the merit. This is a key reason behind the creation of the Silk Road’s numerous painted grottoes, of which the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas are the most splendid example.

For about 400 years, the Buddha’s words were memorized and transmitted orally. They were not written down until the first century AD. But once they were, the Diamond Sutra and other teachings could propagate easily across the great trade routes, in particular the Silk Road. The written scriptures were exactly what a young Chinese monk was after when, in 629, he too embarked on a clandestine journey. His name was Xuanzang (Hsuan Tsang), and he was destined to become one of the world’s greatest travelers. From beyond the grave he would play a pivotal role at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.

Xuanzang was on a quest for spiritual enlightenment rather than a sensitive diplomatic mission when, like the envoy with his yak tail, he traveled west along the Silk Road—by then a well-worn path—from Chang’an. He left behind the capital’s floating pavilions and secluded gardens and slipped through the outer gates of the city’s triple walls to embark on a sixteen-year journey that would take him across the desert and over the jagged Pamir Mountains to India and back to China. He would prove himself an intrepid traveler, a brilliant translator, and a remarkable eyewitness: one part Christopher Columbus, one part St. Jerome, one part Samuel Pepys.

His life has inspired numerous folk tales and legends, such as the classic Chinese novel known in English as
Monkey,
in which he is overshadowed by his companions, including a greedy pig and a trickster monkey. Japanese cartoons and a 1970s cult television series have also drawn on Xuanzang’s adventures. The tale has even inspired an opera performed at London’s Covent Garden in 2008, composed by Damon Albarn, the songwriter and vocalist for the rock band Gorillaz. Folk tales aside, the monk left a written account of the places he visited which has proved so accurate that geographers and archaeologists still consult it today. Like Stein, Xuanzang was fastidious, whether recording the distances between places and the heights of individual stupas or recording the myths, massacres, and monarchs he encountered along his way. But he reveals little of himself and his own life, leaving that for a devoted disciple, Huili, who wrote his biography. Xuanzang’s account is written with philosophic detachment, his disciple’s filled with vivid anecdotes. Together the two works give a unique account of a vanished world and one of the greatest journeys of all time.

Xuanzang began studying Buddhist scriptures when he was about thirteen and was ordained as a monk at twenty. After years spent immersed in Chinese translations, he found the teachings contradictory and incomplete. Likewise, he found the religion’s various schools conflicting. What was true? He resolved to seek clarity from the great masters in distant India. More importantly, he wanted to bring back the original Buddhist texts for translation. Unfortunately, foreign travel was banned and as the young monk, then about twenty-six years old, did not have imperial permission to leave, he departed the capital in secret, traveling by night and hiding during the day. His journey was nearly a short one. His guide tried to murder him near the Jade Gate, the landmark near Dunhuang that marked the western edge of China, through which many Silk Road caravans passed. Amid the desert’s demons and hot winds, he became lost and almost died of thirst. At Gaochang, near Turfan, the oasis city’s king was so impressed by Xuanzang’s knowledge that he forcibly detained him, prompting the monk to begin a hunger strike. The king relented, provided the monk with an escort, supplies, gold, and letters of introduction, and extracted a promise that Xuanzang would remain in Gaochang for three years on his return from India. The monk’s chances of surviving such a trip may have seemed slim, but the gods were clearly on Xuanzang’s side. He lived through a range of death-defying adventures which saw him attacked by bandits, captured by pirates and almost offered as a human sacrifice to the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess Durga.

Apocryphal as the stories sound, the descriptions of the terrain he covered have attracted the attention of explorers, historians, and archaeologists, not least Aurel Stein, who was the same age as Xuanzang when he, too, first departed for India. (Stein suggested there was some truth and wisdom in one of the odder, seemingly more fanciful stories in which the monk is persuaded to swap his good horse for a scrawny nag ahead of a hazardous desert crossing because the old horse had made the trip many times before. Stein knew all too well how horses and camels could not only detect water and food in the desert from a great distance but also remember their locations from previous visits.)

Xuanzang crossed the Pamir Mountains and journeyed through the Buddhist kingdom of Gandhara. Along the way he gave one of the first accounts of the then sparkling new Bamiyan Buddhas of central Afghanistan. They glinted in the sun with their gold paint and jeweled ornaments. They had been carved into a cliff about a hundred years before the monk arrived. The figures—one stood 180 feet tall, the other 125 feet—rose above a valley that was home to a flourishing Buddhist community with thousands of monks. And there they remained for 1,600 years—long after the Buddhist culture that created them had vanished from the valley—until the Afghan Taliban blew them to pieces in March 2001. Curiously, Xuanzang describes a third, much larger Bamiyan Buddha, a sleeping figure 900 feet long said to be within a monastery nearby. His description has prompted a search for its elusive remains in recent years, although a smaller reclining Buddha was found in 2008.

Xuanzang made his way along the Himalayan foothills to the Buddhist “holy land” in northeast India. He arrived at the great center of Buddhist learning, Nalanda, one of the world’s first universities. The center had about 10,000 students and was in its heyday when Xuanzang first saw its pointed turrets, sparkling roof tiles, lotus ponds, and flowering groves. It drew scholars from other lands—Japan, China, Persia, and Tibet—to study not just Buddhism but medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Its three libraries were so extensive that when they were razed by Muslim invaders in the twelfth century—about the time the University of Oxford was established—they were said to have burned for months. The ruins of what was once an architectural masterpiece remain today in Bihar state. A memorial hall to Xuanzang was opened at Nalanda in 2007, with a statue of the pilgrim carrying scrolls on his back.

At Nalanda, the great abbot Silabhadra was expecting him. Years earlier, the abbot had a dream foretelling that a monk would come from China and ensure the survival of Mahayana teachings abroad. Xuanzang became the abbot’s disciple. As well as studying, Xuanzang visited Buddhism’s sacred sites in India and present-day Nepal: Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini; Bodhgaya, where he attained enlightenment; Sarnath, where he preached his first sermon; and Kushinagar, where he died.

Xuanzang also visited Jetavana Vihara, the place where the Buddha first delivered the Diamond Sutra teaching. A seven-story temple was built and one of the first statues of the Buddha was said to have been created there out of sandalwood. But the park named after Prince Jeta was in ruins, and little remained other than a solitary brick building containing an image of the Buddha. The city of Sravasti, too, lay in ruins, although a stupa marked where the generous merchant who procured the site had lived. Pilgrims still visit the remains northeast of Lucknow today.

After years of study and travel—and having acquired hundreds of sacred texts to translate—the monk planned his return home. But it was a dangerous journey, as he knew all too well. Would he make it? How long would he live? And how would he get his sacred material safely back to China? He put his questions to a fortune teller, a naked Jain, who appeared in Xuanzang’s cell at Nalanda one day. Yes, he would get home safely. He would live another ten years. (He lived another twenty-plus.) As well, the Jain said, Indian kings would help Xuanzang on his way. And indeed one king provided an enormous white elephant, the equivalent of supplying a private Learjet today. No one could remember a monk ever being given an elephant before. The animal could carry Xuanzang’s baggage but his fuel costs were high, requiring forty bundles of hay a day. Thoughtfully, the monk’s regal patron provided plenty of gold and silver to pay for the elephant’s prodigious appetite and Xuanzang’s caravan. The monk’s heavy baggage included more than 200 sutras, six statues of the Buddha, and other relics. His return to China, though, was not without mishap. He lost some of his manuscripts while crossing a treacherous stretch of the Indus River. In the mountains on his way to Kashgar, he was attacked by robbers. In the ensuing panic, his normally placid elephant plunged into a river and drowned. When Stein read of this, he took the pilgrim’s tale at face value. From the topographical description, Stein identified the likely gorge, a narrow spot particularly vulnerable to attack by robbers.

At the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, Xuanzang awaited the delivery of more manuscripts to replace those lost in the Indus. The monk’s description of Khotan evokes a Paris of the desert, where sophisticated and beautifully dressed inhabitants thrived on art, music, and literature. He also described a local legend about how the closely guarded secret of silk-making spread beyond China. According to his story, the king of Khotan, determined to learn the secret, sought the hand in marriage of a Chinese princess. He sent an envoy to collect the new bride and warn her that her new homeland was without silk. If she wanted robes of the precious material, she would need to bring the means to make the fabric herself. The princess discreetly acquired silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds and hid them in her headdress. She smuggled them across the Chinese frontier knowing the border guards would not dare search the headdress of a princess. Stein recognized the same legend depicted on an ancient painted panel he plucked from the desert.

Having slipped out of China without permission, Xuanzang decided it was prudent to let the Imperial Court know he would soon be returning but was presently stuck without transport across the desert since losing his elephant. The emperor sent officials from Dunhuang to meet him. Xuanzang rested at Dunhuang, where it is assumed he visited the nearby caves, before traveling to Chang’an and a hero’s welcome. He did not return to Gaochang because its king had died during Xuanzang’s long travels, thereby releasing him from his promise. Instead, he spent the rest of his life translating Buddhist scriptures, including the Diamond Sutra, and is still considered among China’s greatest translator monks. He too is commemorated at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in a vivid Tang dynasty image, in which he is shown crossing the Pamir Mountains with his white elephant and caravan. As well as his translations, he wrote the account of his travels,
Records of the Western Regions,
a work Stein consulted like a seventh-century Lonely Planet guide.