Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  But Xuanzang was not without worries. The roads were indeed very dangerous, as he knew only too well. But it was just himself before. Now he had collected more than six hundred sutras and seven statues, one four feet high. How could he get them back, and safely, to China? He was not sure. He went to pray to his favourite Bodhisattva Guanyin in a temple near Nalanda. The statue there was supposed to have divine power, and was protected by a high wall. He was told if his offering of garlands were to land on the arms and the neck of the Bodhisattva, he would have his wishes granted. He was beside himself when it did. Now he was ready to go.

  Just when he was about to leave, the King of Assam sent a messenger with a request for the Chinese master to visit him. Xuanzang was keen to go home and declined. The messenger came back, saying that if he did not agree the consequences would be severe. Shilabhadra advised him to comply. But he had hardly arrived in Assam when King Harsha demanded he proceed to his capital Kanauj on the banks of the Ganges. The King of Assam protested but he received this reply: ‘Send the Chinese master or your head.’

  Harsha was no stranger to Xuanzang. He was the most powerful ruler in India at the time, controlling half the subcontinent. His appreciation of Buddhist monks was well described by his court biographer, a contemporary of Xuanzang: ‘You and your fellows are the pillars to support the world under its grievous calamities. You are the lamps of religion, softly bright with kindness, and powerful to dispel the darkness of delusion.’ Xuanzang had passed through Kanauj earlier, while the king was away touring his empire. As usual, he noted down what he saw and heard, but in somewhat flowery language – no doubt he admired Harsha as a strong patron of Buddhism. ‘The king is a man of heroic character and has great administrative abilities. His virtue moves heaven and earth; his righteousness influences men and gods. So he can rule over India. When order has been restored in his domain, people live in peace. Military campaigns have been put to an end; weapons are disused and good deeds encouraged. He orders that no living beings should be killed in his kingdom and his people are not to eat meat. He has built many monasteries at the holy places and each year he entertains all the monks in the country for twenty-one days.’

  It turned out that Harsha was not only a great patron of Buddhism but an admirer of China – he had sent an envoy there the year before to establish friendly relations. Now he could find out more about that distant and enigmatic people. When he heard Xuanzang had arrived in the early evening, he could not wait to meet him. He proceeded along the Ganges with several thousand soldiers who carried candles and marched to the beat of two hundred drums. When the drums stopped and the dust settled, Xuanzang saw this majestic man, with a powerful body and moon-like face, and clad in silk and jewels. The stately figure bent down and touched Xuanzang’s feet. They had a brief talk and a longer one the next day. Harsha was greatly taken with him, and decided to hold a grand public debate, at which the ‘Master from China’ would speak first, followed by any Brahmin priests and Theravada monks who might wish to challenge him.

  The great assembly opened with a royal procession. A large and finely caparisoned elephant carried a golden Buddha on its back. King Harsha walked on its right and the King of Assam on its left. Xuanzang and Harsha’s personal teachers followed. Then came the kings, ministers and distinguished masters from all over India, everyone on elephants, amid chanting monks and musicians beating drums. When they arrived at the assembly point, Xuanzang saw a forest of canopies, palanquins, chariots and elephants that stretched for miles along the Ganges. A thousand monks came from Nalanda alone to applaud him. They were concerned for him, but Xuanzang was undaunted. He had studied every school of Buddhism and the Brahminic texts, all with the best teachers alive. He was ready for the biggest challenge of his journey. ‘My studies may have been superficial and my knowledge may be slight,’ he said to the monks, ‘but you need not worry. If by any chance I get the worst of it, I am merely a monk from China.’

  The royal visitors and their ministers, the religious masters and heretics, all crowded into a hall specially built for the debate; many had to sit outside. For the next five days Xuanzang expounded the sutras and the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism: the salvation and enlightenment not just of oneself but of all people. Interruption was forbidden, but when he finished, he expected to be questioned. Not a single opponent dared to come forward. Xuanzang’s eloquence, his mastery of all the doctrines of Buddhism and the Brahminic texts, his persuasiveness and the power of his presence were overwhelming. He was beyond challenge.

  Harsha was proud, and deeply gratified. He declared Xuanzang the undisputed master, who was then given the title of ‘Mahayana Deva’ and ‘Deva of Liberation’, the greatest of all honours for a Buddhist. The king ordered a large elephant to be decorated with tapestries and invited the Master to ride on it and go round the city, announcing his victory. Xuanzang declined. So his robe was placed on the elephant and a crier walked in front of it announcing that the Master from China had been victorious in his debate. Xuanzang must have felt very honoured, although he does not tell us so. Amid praise, the Buddha says, the wise man does not exhibit elation: ‘As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, the wise are not ruffled by praise or blame.’ He also respectfully declined Harsha’s offer to build him one hundred monasteries throughout his kingdom and put him in charge. In the summer of 641, riding an elephant from Harsha, Xuanzang left the land of the Buddha for his long journey home.

  I returned to China from Bombay after Ajanta: beyond there I knew there was very little to see that would recall Xuanzang’s journey. I had been travelling for six months, hardly a match for Xuanzang’s eighteen years, but challenging in a different way. I could not wait to find out what the last leg of my journey would reveal.

  TEN

  Battleground of the Faiths

  XUANZANG BEGAN his journey home in style, riding on a white elephant, and accompanied by King Harsha’s escort. He carried the fruits of his travels, most importantly the scriptures he had set out to find. But soon he ran into dangerous terrain: in the Punjab there were so many bandits that he sent a monk ahead as a scout, to tell them, ‘We are monks from a very far country to learn more of the Dharma. All we have with us are some holy books, relics, and statues. You generous men, we ask your help and protection.’ But he could do nothing about the turbulent water of the Indus River. His boat nearly sank in the middle of it and a man fell in with fifty of his books of scriptures.

  The next challenge was to scale the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountains, two of the highest ranges in the world. ‘So high was the mountain and so stormy the wind that even birds could not fly over them,’ Xuanzang wrote of the Hindu Kush. As to the Pamirs, he must have recalled with some trepidation the avalanche that killed most of his retinue on the way out. The same desolate landscape was waiting for him: no trees, no crops, no human traces, just endless expanses of snow. But this time he was more cautious: he waited in a caravan site in a valley for over a month until the snow stopped. This was the spot where a caravan with thousands of merchants and their animals perished in a blizzard. A monk built this caravanserai so that merchants and travellers would have somewhere to rest when the weather was really bad.

  But where nature was benign, man was not. Just when Xuanzang thought he was safe, a band of robbers attacked him. They swooped in, dozens of them, like a swarm of wasps. His men scattered. The robbers took all the provisions Harsha had given him, and, fortunately, left the sutras and statues, though a number of them were lost on the back of his elephant, which was so frightened it jumped over a precipice into a ravine. Once again, Xuanzang was lucky to escape with his life. He remembered his promise to King Qu Wentai to preach in his kingdom, but he had learned from travelling merchants that Emperor Taizong had taken over Gaochang. So he kept on towards Khotan on the southern route of the Silk Road, an oasis kingdom he had always wanted to visit. It was the spring of 644, two and a half years after he had set off from King Harsha’s court.

  ‘The peopl
e are polite, honest, gentle and respectful. They love literature and arts and are very good at them. They lead a prosperous and contented life.’ This is how the Khotanese struck Xuanzang. But he also appreciated Khotan for something closer to his heart. This was the first country in the Western Region to embrace Buddhism. Xuanzang even tells us how this happened. An arhat came from Kashmir to promulgate the Buddha’s teachings and the King of Khotan said to him: ‘Let the great saint show himself. Having seen his appearance I will believe in him, build a monastery for monks, and advance his cause.’ An image of the Buddha duly appeared. Xuanzang reported that the Buddha was supposed to have come and blessed the kingdom in person. This is perhaps more a legend than reality, but it is true that Kashmiri monks were the first to take Buddhism eastwards in the first century BC. The kings of Khotan had been great patrons of Buddhism ever since, encouraging the people to live by the Dharma, and building monasteries of great beauty and grandeur. It was to Khotan that the earliest Chinese pilgrims travelled in search of the sutras, and masters to expound them. They left glowing accounts of the people and their faith, and a wonderful collection of stories called The Sutra of the Sage and the Fool, which Xuanzang must have read, and which Chinese monks still study. Now an equally flourishing Buddhist kingdom awaited him, with more than one hundred monasteries and five thousand monks.

  Xuanzang could not have found a more welcoming country in which to stay. Khotan was China’s closest ally in the Western Region. When the Chinese were about to conquer the region in the first century BC, the King of Khotan decided to throw his weight behind them. He sent the crown prince to the Chinese capital as a token of his trust and goodwill; he helped to persuade other principalities of the Taklamakan to surrender to Chinese rule; when some refused, he lent 25,000 of his men to the Chinese general to wipe them out. But later the imperial commissar became suspicious of Khotan’s unreserved loyalty and cut off the head of the king in a coup, only to see the Khotanese and the whole region rise up and rebel. Then the Kushans and the Turks took control. Now with China unified and becoming strong again under Emperor Taizong, the King of Khotan could not help but worry for his country. He sent Taizong a jade belt; he also dispatched his son to join the emperor’s imperial guard, all in the hope that his small oasis kingdom would be left out of the clutches of the new Chinese empire.

  So when the King of Khotan heard a distinguished Chinese master was coming, he could not have been more hospitable. He went in person to the border and had a tent set up there. After he was satisfied with all the preparations, he made his sons and ministers wait on the spot and he returned to the capital to receive the Chinese pilgrim formally into his kingdom three days later. Xuanzang was greeted by a jubilant crowd beating drums, burning incense and throwing flowers on the ground he touched.

  Thirteen hundred years later, my reception was not so warm. I knew things were not good down south. I had heard in Korla that some Uighurs who wanted an independent ‘Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan’ had been discovered in their secret hideout in the Khotan prefecture and in the shoot-out that followed, several of them and a couple of policemen were killed. A state of emergency was declared throughout the whole region.

  It was not the first time that the Chinese government had to deal with the Uighurs’ desire to break away. China’s last dynasty, the Qing, brought Xinjiang under its control again in the eighteenth-century. But we have not had an easy time with the Uighurs ever since: there has been an uprising every decade or so and a major upheaval every thirty years. Each one was devastating and added to the mistrust and hostility on either side. But the most shattering of all was the rebellion in the 1860s and 1870s, just after the Opium War, when the Chinese emperor often wondered if he should simply wash his hands of his troublesome frontier region. He did not have the courage to do so; he would have been condemned for losing the territory that his forebears had fought so hard to acquire – an unforgivable sin. Eventually, his general, Zuo Zongtang, regained Xinjiang for him, but not without earning himself the nickname ‘Zuo the Butcher’. It was said that he told his soldiers to bring back the heads of all the Muslims they killed, but there were so many, the troops could not carry them and they brought back the ears instead, in sacks. The campaign was so long – fifteen years – that the young willows the general had planted on his way out were all thick trees when he came back. The Uighurs rebelled again and again, though rarely after 1949, until the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the rise of the pan-Islamic movement in Central Asia. And here I was, right in the thick of it.

  Strangely I felt there could not have been a safer time for a Han Chinese to visit Khotan: surely it would be foolish for anyone to cause trouble when the whole army was on the alert. So I found myself in the oasis city late one evening. The streets were wide, lined with brand-new buildings, all decorated with white tiles as in any other Chinese city. There were people everywhere, moving slowly but purposefully. Conspicuous by their uniforms were the vast numbers of police. What was happening? I asked the young Uighur man next to me on the coach. He looked at me with surprise: ‘Tomorrow will be your National Day. I think they are going to celebrate it with fireworks tonight.’ I had lost track of time. The next day would be the first of October and it would be the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. I read in the newspaper that all government institutions would have to organize festivities to mark this important occasion. Before we boarded the coach, the drivers at the depot were singing a revolutionary song from the 1950s, called ‘No Communist Party, no new China’. It praised the Communist Party for having led China from darkness into light, from poverty to riches. I remembered thinking how strange it was that they were churning out this old stuff. It never occurred to me they were rehearsing for the big day.

  I checked into a small hotel and called Yang Weijiang, a friend of Fat Ma, the travel agent in Turfan whom I had come to know well. She was not at home. I had a quick meal in the hotel restaurant and then went into the streets. I followed the crowd and soon came to a square in the centre of the city; it was packed but the mood was curiously sombre. As I looked round, I began to see why: wherever there was a cluster of people, there were men with walkie-talkies. They must be policemen; and I could only assume there were more of them less easily identified. The fireworks were late but nobody seemed to mind, as if they knew it was a difficult decision for the municipal government: the crowd was an obvious target for the separatists and an explosion would cause not only great damage but also huge embarrassment; if the authorities decided to cancel the festivities, they would be seen as caving in to pressure. It was a tricky situation. As I was pondering whether to leave or not, I heard a big explosion some distance away. I jumped, thinking it might be a bomb. Then I saw this beautiful cloud of colours in the sky turning into a rain of falling comets. The fireworks had finally begun. But there were no joyful shouts, only audible groans of relief. And then with each fireball shooting into the darkness of the night, first my heart thumped in fear and then I relaxed a little. The tension of a nightmare scenario of carnage gnawed away any sense of joy and fun. After a while, I went back to the hotel.

  Xuanzang had a worrying problem in Khotan too. This was the last stage of his journey, only three months’ travel to Dunhuang, on the old Chinese frontier. He was buoyed up by the prospect of coming home. He had been travelling for eighteen years. He had kept to his purpose and declined all the honours and positions that might have delayed him in achieving his ultimate goal of bringing what he thought was the true Buddhism back to China. There is a Chinese saying, ‘The returning heart is like the flight of an arrow’. He was impatient to be back – but the arrow had to stop in mid-air.

  He had originally left China in secret, violating Emperor Taizong’s prohibition against travelling abroad – a grave offence for which he could be put to death. How would he be treated when he returned? Would the emperor forgive him? He was not sure. Furthermore he had come a long way in understanding not
only the Dharma but also the importance of propagating it. He knew he must secure the emperor’s endorsement for the translation of the scriptures he had brought back from India. The purpose of his pilgrimage was to find the truth for himself, but also to reveal it to followers in China. How many scriptures could he translate on his own even if he devoted the rest of his life to them? How many copies could he distribute? And how many people could benefit from the fruits of his journey? As Daoan, one of China’s great monks, said two centuries earlier: ‘Without imperial support, the Dharma will not flourish.’

  With much uncertainty, and with even more at stake, Xuanzang wrote a letter to Taizong. He used his characteristic charm, his brilliant, persuasive skill and his astute sense of judgement to please, flatter and impress. It is worth quoting at length because it shows how this great mind worked to achieve its goal. The letter began with references to the great sages in Chinese history, the guardians of our morals and ethics. If the ancient kings and emperors supported the learned, how much more should a great man like Taizong. After confessing how he had left against the emperor’s command, Xuanzang continued:

  I have accomplished a journey of more than fifty thousand li. Yet despite the thousand differences of customs and manners I have witnessed, the myriads of dangers I have encountered, by the goodness of heaven I have returned without accident, and now offer my homage with a body unimpaired, and a mind satisfied with the accomplishment of my vow … I have seen things not seen before and heard sacred words not heard before; I have witnessed spiritual prodigies exceeding all the wonders of Nature, have borne testimony to the highest qualities of our august Emperor and won for him the high esteem and praise of the people.