Gāosēng Fǎxiǎn zhuàn 高僧法顯傳
Travel Record of the Eminent Monk Fǎ-xiǎn (also: A Record of the Buddha-Lands)
written by 法顯 (Fǎxiǎn, ca. 338 – ca. 422, 記)
About the work
A 1-juan early-medieval Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage memoir — the earliest extant first-hand Chinese account of a journey to India and back. Composed by the Eastern-Jìn monk Fǎxiǎn 法顯 after his return to China in Yìxī 義熙 9 = 413 and during the active translation-period at the Dàochǎngsì 道場寺 in Jiànkāng. The text is also known as 《佛國記》 Fóguó jì (“Record of the Buddha-Lands”), and is transmitted in Taishō 51 as T2085. The dating bracket is 414 – 422 (the period between Fǎxiǎn’s return and his death).
Abstract
The work narrates Fǎ-xiǎn’s pilgrimage from Cháng’ān in Hóng-shǐ 弘始 2 (= 399 / 400 — recorded as 己亥 in the source) to India and his return by sea via Siṃhala (Sri Lanka) and Java to Qīng-zhōu 青州 (Shāndōng) in 413. Travelling overland from Cháng’ān through Lǒng 隴, Zhāng-yē 張掖, Dūn-huáng 敦煌, the Tarim Basin (with detailed accounts of Khotan 于闐, Qarashahr 焉耆, Karashar 烏夷), through the Pamir mountains and Hindu Kush, into Gandhāra and onward to the central-Indian Buddhist sites — Vārāṇasī, Kuśinagara, Kapilavastu, Lumbinī, Vaiśālī, Rājagṛha, the Gṛdhrakūṭa, Bodhgayā, the Nālandā region, and Pāṭaliputra (where he spent three years studying Sanskrit and acquiring manuscripts). After a further sojourn in Tāmraliptī he sailed to Siṃhala (where he spent two years, and where he is the principal early Chinese witness to the Sinhalese Buddhist tradition), then by sea via Java back to China.
The work is unusually rich in ethnographic and economic detail: the trade-routes, monastic populations, vihāra statistics, scriptural canons preserved at major Indian centres, and the contemporary state of the Indian Buddhist saṅgha. It is the principal early-5th-century witness to Indian Buddhism — a witness all the more valuable in that very few Indian Buddhist textual sources of comparable date survive.
The work also documents the circumstances of its own composition: the closing colophon, by an unnamed contemporary, observes that Fǎxiǎn’s calmness in retrospectively reviewing his sufferings (“looking back on what he had passed through, he could not but feel his heart move and his sweat run”) shows that “from the time the great teaching flowed eastward, none has cast off the body in the search for the dharma to the degree that Fǎxiǎn did” — fixing the work’s status, even at the moment of its composition, as the foundational text of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage tradition.
Translations and research
- James Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886) — the classic English translation, available in modernised editions.
- Samuel Beal, Travels of Fah-hian and Sung-yun (London: Trübner, 1869).
- 章巽, 法顯傳校注 (Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi gǔjí, 1985) — the principal modern Chinese critical edition.
- Max Deeg, Das Gaoseng-Faxian-zhuan als religionsgeschichtliche Quelle (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005) — the principal contemporary German-language critical study.
- 足立喜六, 法顯傳：中亞印度南海紀行の研究 (Tōkyō, 1936; Chinese trans. Hé Jiàn-mín 何健民 et al.) — the standard Japanese-language critical study.
- Etienne Lamotte, Histoire du bouddhisme indien (Louvain, 1958) — uses the Fó-guó jì extensively.
Other points of interest
The work is the direct prototype for the later great Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage memoirs — including KR6r0121 Xuánzàng 玄奘’s DàTáng xīyù jì (T2087, 645) and KR6r0126 Yìjìng 義淨’s Nánhǎi jìguī nèifǎ zhuàn (T2125, 691). The genre that Fǎxiǎn invented — the first-person Chinese-Buddhist Indian-pilgrimage memoir — is one of the most distinctive contributions of medieval Chinese Buddhist literature, and produces over the following centuries the principal Chinese-language documentary witness to medieval Indian and Central-Asian Buddhism.