Chapters I–XIII of Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, in James Legge's translation — Ch'ang-gan to Nagara, across the Gobi, the Onion range and the Indus. Read from
RAW/books/A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 2 — Chapters XIV–XXVI · Part 3 — Chapters XXVII–XL · What Runs Through All of It. No sibling thread map exists for this source yet.
⚠ Supersedes the original whole-book report, which merged the whole journey into one account. What changed: the chapter-by-chapter reading recovers the local rules — three days' hospitality, eight seals, the wheat, the bowl — that a merged reading treats as colour.
A note on the text. Everything cited here is Fa-hien's own narrative. Legge's footnotes are a nineteenth-century scholar's commentary and are not the worldview of anybody inside the source; where a note is used it is named as Legge's.
Source ingest: Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms
A man sets out because the rule-book is wrong. Fa-hien was living in Ch'ang-gan and deploring the mutilated and imperfect state of the collection of the Books of Discipline. So he made an agreement with four other monks that they would go to India and fetch the Disciplinary Rules.1 That is the whole motive, stated in one sentence, and nothing else in forty chapters displaces it.
What is worth having. An accurate copy of the monastic code, at the price of the rest of your life. Not a teaching, not a vision, not a relic — the rules for how the order runs its internal and external business. Everything he goes on to see is seen by a man who set out for a legal document.
What is real. The desert has demons in it, and they are listed alongside the distances. The prefect of T'un-hwang supplied the means of crossing a waste in which there are many evil demons and hot winds, and travellers who meet them perish to a man.2 The demons get exactly the same grammar as the wind. Neither is a metaphor and neither needs an argument.
How you know where you are going. By the dead. There is not a bird to be seen in the air above, nor an animal on the ground below. Though you look all round most earnestly to find where you can cross, you know not where to make your choice, the only mark and indication being the dry bones of the dead.2 The route exists because people died on it in a line.
The shape of time. The year has a fixed stopping place in it. They stopped for the summer retreat at K'een-kwei, went on when it was over, and passed another retreat with the enlarged company before resuming.3 Travel is what happens between retreats, and the calendar of the order, not the season or the road, decides when a journey pauses.
How people should relate. A king houses you and it has a name. The king of Chang-yih found the country too disturbed for the roads to be used, kept the party in his capital, and acted the part of their danapati — their donor-host, the man who supplies what a monk may not earn.4 The relation is not charity and not hospitality in general; it is a defined role with a word for it, and kings take it up.
What a person is. Somebody who has quitted their family, and who travels in company. The party keeps growing and splitting by name — Che-yen, Hwuy-keen, Sang-shao, Pao-yun, Sang-king join, and then Fa-hien and four others start ahead in the suite of an envoy while the rest wait.3 Nobody in this book travels as an individual until the others are dead or turned back.
What makes things happen. Disturbance in a country closes the roads. That is the first causal statement in the book and it is entirely political: the country was so much disturbed that travelling was impossible.4 The demons are in the desert; the obstacle in the settled world is other men's wars.
Read: lines 228–239.
Seventeen days, about fifteen hundred li, and a country with a thin barren soil. The clothes of the common people are coarse and like those worn in the land of Han — some felt, some coarse serge or haircloth — and that was the only difference he saw.5
How people should relate — and what the whole journey turns on. The rules of India are practised by everybody here, commoners and monks alike, only the monks do it more exactly and the laymen more loosely.5 Same rules, different exactness. That is the model he carries all the way to Ceylon, and it means he never once describes a foreign practice as a foreign practice. He describes it as this one done well or done slackly.
How you know. A shared book language across kingdoms that cannot speak to each other. Each kingdom had its own peculiar barbarous speech, and the monks, who had given up the worldly life, were all students of Indian books and the Indian language.5 A man from Ch'ang-gan can walk fifteen hundred li into a place whose speech is unintelligible to him and be understood by four thousand men there, because they all learned the same texts. That is the infrastructure the whole book runs on, stated once and never remarked upon again.
What a person is. Somebody measurable by how strictly they keep the code. At Woo-e the monks were so strict that sramans from Ts'in were all unprepared for their regulations.6 Fa-hien does not say the Woo-e monks were wrong or that his own were lax. He records that his party did not know the local standard and could not meet it.
What is worth having, and what its absence costs. Propriety and righteousness owed to strangers. The people of Woo-e neglected these duties and treated the travellers so meanly that Che-yen, Hwuy-keen and Hwuy-wei turned back towards Kao-ch'ang, hoping to find the means of continuing from there.6 A failure of hospitality is what breaks the party — not the desert, not the mountains.
What makes things happen. One man's liberality. Fa-hien and the rest went straight on south-west only through the liberality of Foo Kung-sun, the guest-master, who had already got them two months in the monastery.6 The journey proceeds from named individual to named individual, and stalls when one of them fails.
What is real, and the shape of time. Nothing on either beyond the counting — seventeen days, fifteen hundred li, more than four thousand monks, a month here, a month and five days of uninhabited country in which the difficulties and sufferings were unparalleled in human experience.6 The chapter's whole content is the social gradient above.
Read: lines 280–285.
Houses standing apart like separate stars, each with a tope in front of the door. The smallest of them twenty cubits high or rather more.7 That is what devotion looks like from the road: not a temple in the middle of a town but a monument at every doorway, and the smallest one still three times the height of a man.
How people should relate. A room is kept ready for a monk who has not arrived. They make rooms in the monasteries for monks from all quarters, and the use of them is given to travelling monks who turn up, who are provided with whatever else they require.7 The infrastructure is built for strangers in advance, which is the only reason a journey like this one is possible at all.
What a person is — and it is audible. Three thousand monks at Gomati are called to meals by a bell. They enter with a reverent gravity, take their seats in regular order, and keep a perfect silence. No sound comes from the alms-bowls or the other utensils. When one of them wants food he is not allowed to call out for it; he makes signs with his hands.8 A trained man is one whose meal makes no noise.
How people should relate, at the top. The king takes his crown off in the street. When the image-car is a hundred paces from the gate, he puts off his crown of state, changes into a fresh suit, goes out barefoot with flowers and incense in his hands and two rows of followers behind him, and does homage at the image's feet with his head and face bowed to the ground.9 The queen and her ladies are up in the gallery over the gate scattering flowers that float down and land anywhere.
What is worth having, and where the money goes. Of whatever things of highest value the kings of the six countries east of the range possess, they contribute the greater portion to the King's New Monastery and use only a small portion themselves.10 Not a tithe. The greater portion.
The shape of time. The monastery took eighty years to build and ran across three reigns.10 Two of the three kings who paid for it never saw it. The procession works the other way — it begins on the first day of the fourth month and ends on the fourteenth, one monastery's car per day, and then the king and queen go back inside.9
What is real, and what makes things happen. Not directly in the range read (lines 322–338). What the chapter carries instead is precedence: the Gomati monks, being mahayana students and held in great reverence by the king, took the first day of the procession ahead of all the others.9 Which school you belong to decides what day you go.
Read: lines 322–338.
A man leaves the party to follow a stranger. Sang-shao, by himself alone, followed a Tartar who was an earnest follower of the Law, and went off towards Kophene.11 No discussion is recorded and no objection. Shared observance is enough to travel with somebody, and the party is not a unit anyone is obliged to stay in.
How people should relate. A king's standing is quoted in monks. The king of Tsze-hoh was a strenuous follower of the Law and had around him more than a thousand monks, mostly students of the mahayana.11 That is the whole description of the man. Across forty chapters this is the standard form: what a ruler is, is a number and a school.
The shape of time. The retreat again decides the itinerary. Twenty-five days to Tsze-hoh, fifteen days there, four days south into the Ts'ung-ling mountains, then a halt at Yu-hwuy to keep the retreat, and only when it was over another twenty-five days among the hills to K'eeh-ch'a, where they found Hwuy-king and his two companions waiting.11
Everything else. Not in the range read (lines 386–389). The chapter is a stage of a road, and what it carries is the counting and the two facts above.
Read: lines 386–389.
A king gives everything away and then buys it back. The pancha parishad falls every five years. The king requests the presence of the sramans from every quarter of his kingdom, and they come as if in clouds. The place of session is grandly decorated: silken streamers and canopies hung out, water-lilies made in gold and silver and fixed up behind the seats of the chief men, clean mats spread. Then the king and his ministers present their offerings according to rule and law.12
Then it goes further. He exhorts the ministers to make other and special offerings, and the doing of this runs one, two, three, five, or even seven days. When that is finished he takes his own riding-horse, saddles and bridles it and waits on it himself, and has the noblest and most important minister in the kingdom mount it. Then he distributes fine white woollen cloth, all sorts of precious things, and the articles the sramans require, uttering vows along with all his ministers as he does it. And when the distribution has taken place, he again redeems whatever he wishes from the monks.13
What is worth having. The giving, not the goods. The circuit is closed on purpose: the property leaves and comes back, and what stays behind is the vow and the fact that everybody watched. A king who wanted to be poorer could simply stay poorer. This king wants the transfer to have happened.
What makes things happen. Monks ripen wheat. The country is high and cold and only the wheat comes on. After the monks have taken their annual portion of it the mornings suddenly show hoar-frost — so the king always begs the monks to make the wheat ripen before they take their share.14 The request is made to the men, not to a god, and it is made as a matter of agricultural scheduling.
How people should relate. The lay world underwrites the order and gets the harvest for it. That is the exchange the whole system rests on, and here it is stated as a bargain with a deadline.
What is real. Buddha's stone spittoon is in the country, the colour of his alms-bowl, and a tooth of his, over which a tope has been reared with more than a thousand monks and disciples attached to it.15 A spittoon is listed in the same breath as a tooth and neither is remarked on. The category is things he touched, and it has no floor.
What a person is. The rules observed by the sramans here are remarkable and too numerous to be mentioned in detail.15 That is the one place in the book where Fa-hien, who came for the rules, says there were too many to write down.
The shape of time, and everything else. Five years between assemblies; one, two, three, five or seven days of special offering; the assembly in the first, second or third month, mostly in spring.12 Nothing in the range read (lines 412–421) on what a person is beyond the line above, or on how you know.
Read: lines 412–421.
Dragons that spit poisonous wind. The snow rests on the Onion mountains winter and summer. Among them are venomous dragons which, when provoked, spit forth poisonous winds and cause showers of snow and storms of sand and gravel — and not one in ten thousand who meets these dangers escapes with his life. The people of the country call the range the Snow mountains.16
What is real. A weather system with a temper. The dragons are provoked, which means the danger is relational rather than random, and the local name for the range records only the snow. Fa-hien reports both the explanation and the plain name and does not choose between them.
How you know what a being looks like when he is not here. You go and look, and you go three times. An arhan of that kingdom took a clever artificer up to the Tushita heaven by his supernatural power, to see the height, complexion and appearance of Maitreya Bodhisattva, and then come back and make an image of him in wood. First and last, this was done three times, and then the image was completed — eighty cubits high and eight cubits across at the base, knee to knee.17
Three trips. The craftsman did not get it right the first time or the second, and the fix each time was another journey to check. That is a working method, and it treats a heaven as a place you can return to with a question.
What is worth having. An image accurate enough that kings compete over it. On fast-days it emits light, and the kings of the surrounding countries vie with one another in presenting offerings to it. Here it is — to be seen now as of old.17
How people should relate, and what makes things happen. Not in the range read (lines 442–449) beyond the competition between kings above. The chapter carries the mountains and the image.
What a person is, and the shape of time. A month on the way to get across the range; the image standing unchanged from then to now.17 The one anthropological fact is the arhan's supernatural power, which is stated as a capacity a man can have and used for transport.
Read: lines 442–449.
Seven hundred ladders down a wall of rock. The way ran along a bank exceedingly precipitous, a hill-like wall of rock ten thousand cubits from the base. When you approach the edge your eyes become unsteady, and if you wanted to go forward there was no place to put your foot. Beneath were the waters of the Indus. In former times men had chiselled paths along the rocks and distributed ladders on the face of them, seven hundred of them altogether, and at the bottom a suspension bridge of ropes crossed the river where the banks are eighty paces apart.18
What makes things happen. Somebody built it. Fa-hien's account of the crossing is entirely an account of earlier labour, and he checks it against the record: the place and its arrangements are in the Records of the Nine Interpreters, but neither Chang K'een nor Kan Ying had reached the spot.19 The two most famous Chinese travellers west did not get this far, and he says so without comment.
How you know — and this is the chapter's centre. The monks asked Fa-hien when the Law of Buddha first went east. His answer is a chain of custody, and he names every link in it. When I asked the people of those countries about it, they all said that it had been handed down by their fathers from of old that, after the setting up of the image of Maitreya Bodhisattva, there were Sramans of India who crossed this river, carrying with them Sutras and Books of Discipline.20
Then he dates it, and he dates it twice. The image was set up rather more than three hundred years after the nirvana, which may be referred to the reign of king P'ing of the Chow dynasty.20 One event, fixed in the Buddhist count and again in the Chinese dynastic count, so that a man from either world can find it.
Who is the authority. The Indian monks ask the Chinese one. He is standing at the western edge of the road his own religion came down, and the men who live there put the question to him because he has just walked its whole length.
What makes things happen, at the largest scale. Not men. We know of a truth that the opening of the way for such a mysterious propagation is not the work of man; and so the dream of the emperor Ming of Han had its proper cause.20 He has just given a fully human account — an image, some sramans, a river, some books — and then says the opening of the way was not human work. Both stand.
What is worth having. Sutras and Books of Discipline, carried across on foot, which is what the men in his own story were doing and what he is doing now.
What is real, what a person is, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 468–475), except as the dating above supplies it: three hundred years, a Chinese reign, and a dream.
Read: lines 468–475.
Three days, and then find your own bed. There are five hundred sangharamas in Woo-chang. When stranger bhikshus arrive at one of them their wants are supplied for three days, after which they are told to find a resting-place for themselves.21
How people should relate. Hospitality with a number on it. Nothing in the chapter suggests the limit is resented or apologised for. It is the rule, it is uniform across five hundred houses, and it is exactly the thing a man planning a fifteen-year journey needs to know. Three days is also long enough to rest and short enough that nobody settles.
What is real. A footprint that changes size depending on who is looking at it. Buddha left a print of his foot here which is long or short according to the ideas of the beholder — and it exists, and the same thing is true about it, at the present day.22 Also the rock where he dried his clothes, fourteen cubits high and more than twenty broad, with one side smooth, and the place where he converted the wicked dragon.
The footprint and the rock are given in the same sentence and the rock is measured. One object behaves according to the viewer and the other has dimensions, and Fa-hien records both the same way. He does not mark the difference, which means he does not think there is one worth marking.
What a person is. Somebody who uses the language of Central India and eats and dresses as they do there. That is his entire description of the people, and it is a statement about connection rather than about character.21
How people relate, when the party splits again. Hwuy-king, Hwuy-tah and Tao-ching went on ahead towards Buddha's shadow in Nagara; Fa-hien and the others stayed in Woo-chang and kept the summer retreat, and went south afterwards.23 Splitting up to cover ground is normal, and the retreat is why they split.
What makes things happen, how you know, what is worth having, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 508–515), except the retreat setting the schedule again.
Read: lines 508–515.
A hawk, a dove, and a man cutting a piece out of himself. Sakra, ruler of the devas, tried the Bodhisattva in a former age by producing a hawk in pursuit of a dove — and the Bodhisattva cut off a piece of his own flesh and with it ransomed the dove.24
What is worth having. A weight of your own flesh, weighed against a bird. The transaction is exact: a ransom, not a rescue. The hawk is owed something and gets it.
How you know this happened here. Because he came back and said so. After Buddha had attained to perfect wisdom, travelling about with his disciples, he arrived at this spot and informed them that this was the place where he ransomed the dove with a piece of his own flesh. In this way the people of the country became aware of the fact, and on the spot reared a tope, adorned with layers of gold and silver plates.24
That is the mechanism behind hundreds of the sites in this book, stated once and plainly. The place did not remember; a man returned and identified it, and the marker went up afterwards.
What is real. A test set by a god who manufactures the situation. Sakra produced the hawk. The dove was not in danger until somebody arranged for it to be, which makes the whole thing an examination with a real cost attached.
How people should relate, what a person is, what makes things happen, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 534–537). The chapter is one story, and everything in it sits on the two dimensions above.
Read: lines 534–537.
A man gave his eyes away here. When Buddha was a Bodhisattva he gave his eyes also for another man in Gandhara, and at the spot they have reared a large tope adorned with layers of gold and silver plates.25
What is worth having. The word doing the work is also. Flesh in the last chapter, eyes in this one, the head and the whole body in the next. Fa-hien is walking through a landscape organised by what the Bodhisattva gave up at each stop, and the sites come in the order the road takes them rather than in the order the stories happened.
How people should relate. The place where Dharmavivardhana, the son of Asoka, ruled.25 A kingdom is located by naming who governed it, and the man named is a king's son placed here by his father — which is how Asoka's administration reaches into this book, as geography.
What a person is. The people of the country were mostly students of the hinayana.25 The census is doctrinal, as it is everywhere.
What is real, how you know, what makes things happen, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 554–555). Five days east from the last stop, and that is the whole chapter.
Read: lines 554–555.
A kingdom named after a decapitation. Takshasila means "the severed head" in the language of China. Here, when Buddha was a Bodhisattva, he gave away his head to a man, and from this circumstance the kingdom got its name.26
What is real. The name of a place is a record of what happened in it. Not a commemoration added afterwards but the name itself, in daily use by people buying and selling. Two days further east is the place where the Bodhisattva threw down his body to feed a starving tigress.27
What is worth having. The giving series finishes here — flesh, eyes, head, whole body — and the fourth item is spent on an animal that was going to die anyway.
How people should relate. Competitive giving, and it never stops. Large topes have been built at both places, adorned with layers of all the precious substances, and the kings, ministers and peoples of the surrounding kingdoms vie with one another in making offerings at them. The trains of those who come to scatter flowers and light lamps at them never cease.27
The verb is the same one used of the kings competing over the Maitreya image. Devotion between rulers is a contest with an audience, and the traffic on the road is continuous. Flowers and lamps are what the contest is scored in, and both burn out, so it has to be paid again tomorrow.
What makes things happen, how you know, what a person is, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 570–576), beyond the seven days' journey and the two days' journey that place the sites.
Read: lines 570–576.
A herd-boy building a tope in the road. Buddha told Ananda that after his pari-nirvana there would be a king named Kanishka who would build a tope on this spot. Kanishka was afterwards born into the world, and once, when he had gone out to look about him, Sakra, ruler of the devas, wanting to put the idea into his head, took the appearance of a little herd-boy and made a tope right in the king's way. The king asked what sort of thing he was making. The boy said, I am making a tope for Buddha. The king said, very good — and immediately reared another one right over the boy's, more than four hundred cubits high and adorned with layers of all the precious substances.28
What makes things happen. A prophecy, and then a god arranging for it to come true. Neither is treated as making the other redundant. Kanishka is prophesied, born, prompted by a disguised deity, and then does it himself, and the story keeps all four steps.
And the joke at the end. When the king's tope was finished, the little tope of the boy came out from its side on the south, rather more than three cubits in height.28 The four-hundred-cubit monument cannot cover the three-cubit one. The small thing extrudes.
What is worth having, and who is allowed to have it. Buddha's alms-bowl is in this country. A king of Yueh-she raised a large force, invaded, and subdued the kingdom, wanting to carry the bowl away — and he and his captains were sincere believers, so they made offerings on a great scale first. Then he had a large elephant grandly caparisoned and the bowl placed on it, and the elephant knelt down on the ground and could not go forward. He had a four-wheeled waggon prepared and the bowl put in it, and eight elephants yoked to it dragged with their united strength and could not move it either.29
The king knew that the time for an association between himself and the bowl had not yet arrived, and was sad and deeply ashamed of himself. So he built a tope and a monastery at the place and left a guard to watch the bowl, making all sorts of contributions.29
What is real. An object with an opinion about who owns it, and a conqueror who accepts the verdict. He had already won the war. Eight elephants is not a failure of force; it is a ruling, and he reads it as one, and his response is shame rather than another attempt.
How you know a thing's capacity. By who is filling it. The bowl holds rather more than two pecks, is of various colours with black predominating, has the seams of its fourfold composition distinctly marked, is about a fifth of an inch thick and has a bright glossy lustre.30 Then: when poor people throw in a few flowers it becomes immediately full, while very rich people wishing to offer many flowers might not stop till they had thrown in hundreds, thousands and myriads of bushels, and would still not be able to fill it.
The measurements are given first, precisely, and then the rule that overrides them. Both are reported as facts about the same object. A fifth of an inch thick and two pecks deep, and a rich man could pour bushels into it all day.
The shape of time, daily. Near midday they bring the bowl out and, along with the common people, make their various offerings to it, and then take their midday meal. In the evening, at the time of incense, they bring it out again.30 More than seven hundred monks are attached to it.
What a person is — and here the party comes apart. Pao-yun and Sang-king made their offerings to the bowl and then resolved to go back. Hwuy-king, Hwuy-tah and Tao-ching had gone ahead to Nagara; Hwuy-king fell ill there and Tao-ching stayed to look after him, while Hwuy-tah came on alone to Purushapura, saw the others, and turned back to Ts'in with Pao-yun and Sang-king. Hwuy-king came to his end in the monastery of Buddha's alms-bowl. And on this Fa-hien went forward alone towards the flat-bone of Buddha's skull.31
Five men leave the story in one paragraph. Three go home, one stays behind to nurse the sick, and one dies in the monastery of the alms-bowl. The sentence that follows is the first in the book with nobody else in it.
How people should relate. By staying with the sick man. Tao-ching's decision is recorded in four words and never praised.
Read: lines 584–593.
Eight men, eight seals, one door. The king of Nagara reveres the flat-bone of Buddha's skull and is anxious it might be stolen. So he has selected eight individuals, representing the eight great families in the kingdom, and given each of them a seal, with which he seals the shrine and guards the relic. At early dawn the eight men come, each inspects his own seal, and then they open the door.32
How people should relate. Security by splitting the key between the families who would otherwise be the ones to take it. No guard, no wall — eight men who each have to look at their own mark in front of the other seven, every morning, forever. The families' rivalry is the lock.
What the morning looks like. They wash their hands with scented water and bring the bone out, and place it outside the vihara on a lofty platform, supported on a round pedestal of the seven precious substances and covered with a bell of lapis lazuli, both adorned with rows of pearls. It is yellowish-white, and forms an imperfect circle twelve inches round, curving upwards to the centre. The keepers climb a high gallery and beat great drums, blow conchs and clash copper cymbals. When the king hears them he comes, and makes his offerings of flowers and incense.32
What a person is, in the moment. Each of them in order raises the bone, places it for a moment on the top of their heads, and departs — going out by the west door, having come in by the east.32 One-way traffic, so the line does not meet itself.
The shape of a day, and it is the same shape for everyone. The king every morning makes his offerings and performs his worship, and afterwards gives audience on the business of his government. The chiefs of the Vaisyas also make their offerings before they attend to their family affairs.33 Relic first, then government. Relic first, then the shop. The order is identical at the top and in the middle of society, and it is stated as a matter of course.
What makes things happen. A robe brings rain. It is a custom of the country, when there is a great drought, for the people to collect in crowds, bring out Buddha's Sanghali, pay worship to it and make offerings — on which there is immediately a great rain from the sky.34 No conditions, no failures reported.
There is also his pewter staff in a wooden tube, sixteen or seventeen cubits long, made of Gosirsha Chandana, and though a hundred or a thousand men were to try to lift it they could not move it.35 Same rule as the alms-bowl: the object decides.
How you know — and the one thing in the book that cannot be copied. South of the city, half a yojana, there is a rock-cavern in a great hill fronting south-west, and here Buddha left his shadow. Looking at it from a distance of more than ten paces, you seem to see Buddha's real form, with his complexion of gold, and his characteristic marks in their nicety clearly and brightly displayed. The nearer you approach, however, the fainter it becomes, as if it were only in your fancy.36
Kings from all the regions around have sent skilful artists to take a copy and none of them has been able to. Set that beside chapter VI, where an artificer went up to a heaven three times and came back with an eighty-cubit Maitreya that everybody could see. There the method worked and here it does not, and the same trade is doing the looking both times. The saying current among the people of the country is that the thousand Buddhas must all leave their shadows here.36
What is worth having. A model. Four hundred paces west of the shadow, Buddha shaved his hair and clipped his nails and built a tope with his disciples, seventy or eighty cubits high, to be a model for all future topes — and it is still standing, with a monastery of more than seven hundred monks beside it and as many as a thousand topes of arhans and pratyeka buddhas around it.37
What is real. A place that does not move. The vihara stands in a square of thirty paces, and though heaven should shake and earth be rent, this place would not move.38 Flower and incense sellers set up outside the door every morning, and the kings of various countries are constantly sending messengers with offerings.
Read: lines 632–649.
Everything above is sourced to the chapters named. Everything below is built rather than found, and is not measured by assessgate.sh.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, taken by three named men. Che-yen, Hwuy-keen and Hwuy-wei turned back towards Kao-ch'ang from Woo-e, hoping to find there the means of continuing.6 That is the fork stated in the source: go on into uninhabited country on one patron's liberality, or go back to a place with resources and try again from there.
Nothing further is recorded about them. What makes the choice real rather than cowardly is the sentence Fa-hien writes about the road they did not take — a month and five days in which the difficulties and the sufferings were unparalleled in human experience. He does not say the three were wrong, and he does not say they were right.
[SPECULATIVE]A constructed one, and it is a forecast. Suppose Fa-hien had turned back with Pao-yun and Sang-king from the alms-bowl. First order, he has the Maitreya image, the crossing, and the whole northern route, which is already more than Chang K'een or Kan Ying brought back. Second order, he has no Books of Discipline — Patna and the three years of copying are still eleven chapters away — so the journey fails at the only thing it was undertaken for. Third order, and this is where it thins, somebody else goes; the road is open, the monasteries keep rooms for strangers, and the traffic on it never ceases. What would have been lost is this account, not the transmission. The route was not fragile. The record of it was.
[SPECULATIVE]A refusal that arrives as physics costs the refuser nothing. The Yueh-she king had won his war and could not be told no by anybody. What told him no was an elephant that would not stand up. He read the kneeling as a verdict on his merit, was ashamed, and built a monastery on the spot instead — which left him with the credit for the shrine and no defeat on the record. Applies when a demand cannot be refused by a person without the refusal becoming a fight. Fails where the claimant is willing to test the mechanism twice; this one tried the waggon and eight elephants before he stopped, and a third attempt would have made the object look merely heavy. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.
[SPECULATIVE]Split the key among the people most able to steal it, and make them look at each other every morning. Eight families, eight seals, one door that only opens when all eight marks have been inspected in company. Applies when the guards and the likeliest thieves are the same set of people, and when the asset must be used daily rather than merely stored. Fails the moment the eight can profit together rather than against each other — the scheme is built on their rivalry, not on their honesty, and nothing in it survives their agreeing. Decision type: power consolidation.