Xuanzang and the Silk Road

Xuanzang, the Tang-dynasty Buddhist monk whose seventeen-year pilgrimage to India and back produced the most influential Chinese account of the Buddhist world, is the most famous of all the Chinese Buddhist travelers of the Silk Road. His journey, undertaken in 629–645 CE during the early Tang dynasty, took him from the Tang capital Chang’an, the modern Xi’an, across the Tarim Basin, over the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountains, through the Buddhist centers of Gandhara and the Ganges valley, and back to China by the southern route. The books that resulted from the journey — a travel account, a record of Buddhist monastic practices in India, and a massive translation corpus — shaped East Asian Buddhism for more than a millennium and remain foundational documents for the study of Buddhism on the Silk Road.

Xuanzang was born in 602 CE in Henan province, into a family with a tradition of Confucian scholarship. He was ordained as a Buddhist monk at the age of thirteen and quickly established himself as a brilliant student of the Buddhist scriptures, especially the Yogacara and Madhyamaka philosophical schools. The Tang dynasty of his youth was the high point of Chinese Buddhist scholarship, and Chang’an was the center of a cosmopolitan Buddhist world that included Indian, Central Asian, Korean, and Japanese monks.

The pilgrimage

By his early twenties, Xuanzang had become convinced that the Chinese translations of many important Buddhist sutras were inadequate, and he determined to travel to India to study the original texts and to bring back authentic scriptures. In 629 CE, he set out from Chang’an, in defiance of an imperial edict forbidding private travel abroad, and made his way westward through the Hexi Corridor to the oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin. The first part of the journey, through the Dunhuang oasis and the Tarim cities, is described in vivid detail in his travel account, and the political and religious geography of the region at the time of his passage is preserved with unusual clarity.

Xuanzang’s route through Central Asia was a tour of the Buddhist Silk Road at its height. He visited Turfan, where the king, a devout Buddhist, provided him with letters of introduction and gifts; Kucha, the great Buddhist center of the northern Tarim, with its painted cave temples and substantial monastic population; and the kingdoms of the Pamirs and Gandhara, where he encountered Buddhist communities in various stages of decline. His description of the great stupa of Kanishka, near Peshawar, is one of the most famous passages in his travel account.

He reached the Buddhist centers of northern India in the 630s and spent the next decade studying at the great monastic universities of Nalanda, Valabhi, and other centers of Indian Buddhist learning. Nalanda, the most important of the Indian Buddhist universities, was at the height of its prestige; Xuanzang studied there for several years and was recognized as one of the most accomplished scholars of his generation. He also visited the principal pilgrimage sites of the Buddha’s life — Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, Kushinagar — and the Hindu and Jain centers of the Ganges plain. His account of contemporary India is, in many respects, the most detailed surviving Chinese description of the country.

Xuanzang is, for Chinese readers, what Marco Polo is for European readers.

The return and the translation movement

Xuanzang left India in 643 CE, carrying with him a substantial collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, relics, and statues. He returned to China by the southern route, through the Pamirs, the Tarim Basin, and the Hexi Corridor, and reached Chang’an in 645 CE, seventeen years after his departure. The emperor Taizong received him with great honor, and the rest of Xuanzang’s life was spent in a remarkable program of translation, scholarship, and patronage that transformed Chinese Buddhism.

The translation bureau established for Xuanzang at the Dacien Temple in Chang’an was the largest Buddhist translation project in Chinese history. Working with a team of assistants, Xuanzang translated 75 Buddhist texts in 1,335 fascicles, including the massive Yogacara-Buddhism treatises that became the doctrinal foundation of the East Asian Yogacara school. The translations he produced were widely regarded as more accurate and more philosophically sophisticated than the older translations of Kumrajiva and others, and they became the standard versions of these texts in East Asia. The translation project occupied the last twenty years of his life, from 645 to 664 CE.

Xuanzang also produced a detailed travel account, the Da Tang Xiyu Ji (“Great Tang Records on the Western Regions”), which is one of the most important historical sources for the seventh-century Silk Road. The account covers the geography, the political systems, and the religious institutions of the regions he visited, and it is the principal Chinese-language source for the history of seventh-century Central Asia and India.

A personal note

A note on the source. The Da Tang Xiyu Ji exists in several recensions, and the most useful English translation is Li Rongxi’s (1996, Numata Center). The older Watters (1904–05) is more learned but is also harder to read. A reader who wants the full experience of the book should read Li’s translation alongside Watters’ commentary.

Further reading

Li Rongxi’s translation of the Da Tang Xiyu Ji (1996) is the working text every modern Xuanzang scholar cites from.

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
• Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
• Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
• The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.

Related pages

See also Famous travelers of the Silk Road, Buddhism on the Silk Road, and The Tang dynasty and the Silk Road.