Xuanzang: Fugitive Monk, Nalanda Scholar and 657 Sanskrit Texts to Chang'an

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Xuanzang was born around 602 CE near Luoyang to a family of scholars and officials. After his father died when he was about nine, he joined his older brother at a monastery, and when the Sui dynasty fell in 618 CE the brothers fled 300 miles south to Chengdu. Ordained at 20, he found Chinese Buddhist texts contradictory after layers of translation and the geyi method of matching Indian ideas to Daoist terms. In 629 CE, with Emperor Taizong of the Tang forbidding foreign travel, he slipped out by night along the Silk Road. In the kingdom of Agni near Turpan he was dismayed to see monks eating meat, and he later crossed the Tian Shan and the Pamirs and saw the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

In India he recorded city plans, clothing, caste and customs, then studied at Nalanda University in Bihar under Silabhadra, learning logic, Sanskrit grammar and the Yogacara philosophy, which holds that experienced reality is built by consciousness. He returned to Chang'an in 645 CE after about 16 or 17 years, was welcomed by Taizong, declined a government post, and translated until his death in 664 CE, producing more than 1,300 fascicles, including the Heart Sutra. His literal method created new Chinese terms and bent Chinese syntax to Sanskrit, which later let scholars reconstruct lost Sanskrit originals. His life became the basis for Journey to the West.

• A band of about 2,000 Turkic bandits fought each other over his belongings and scattered without harming him.
• He wrote as fact that wearing red in the mountains angered dragons and that water dragons could take the form of horses.
• At Nalanda, mastering five texts earned a monk an elephant, and six earned an escort.
• When robbers in an Indian forest led his party toward a dry pond to kill them, a farmer beat a drum and blew a conch to raise 80 villagers to the rescue.
• He brought back 657 Sanskrit texts, seven Buddha statues and more than 100 relics on 20 packhorses, and his skull relic was later divided among China, India and Japan.