Chapters XIV–XXVI of Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, in James Legge's translation — the Little Snowy mountains to the confluence of the five rivers, across the Middle Kingdom. 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 1 — Chapters I–XIII · 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.
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.
Source ingest: Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms
A man freezing to death tells his friend to leave. On the north side of the range, in the shade, they met a cold wind that made them shiver and left them unable to speak. Hwuy-king could not go any farther. A white froth came out of his mouth, and he said to Fa-hien: I cannot live any longer. Do you immediately go away, that we do not all die here. With those words he died.1
What a person is. Somebody whose last calculation is about the other men's chances. He does not ask to be carried, or to be waited with, or to be buried. He gives an instruction with a reason attached, and the reason is arithmetic — one death here, or three.
What makes things happen. Fa-hien stroked the corpse and cried out: Our original plan has failed — it is fate. What can we do?2 Then, in the next clause of the same sentence, he again exerted himself, and they got across to the south of the range. Fate is what he names the loss, and it does not stop him for a line. Both attitudes are in one breath and neither is offered as a correction of the other.
How people should relate. The two survivors go on. There is no funeral in the text, no marker, and no tope for Hwuy-king — the only man in this book to die on the road and get nothing built over him.
The shape of time. They had waited at Nagara until the third month of winter before starting, and at Lo-e they stopped for the summer retreat and went on only when it was over.3 The calendar keeps its hold even in the year a companion dies.
How people should relate, in numbers. Lo-e had nearly three thousand monks studying both the mahayana and the hinayana; Poh-na also more than three thousand, all hinayana.3 Two kingdoms of the same size, one mixed and one not, and no comment on the difference.
What is real, how you know, what is worth having. Not in the range read (line 690), beyond the snow that lies on the mountains winter and summer and the level country on both banks of the Indus where they crossed it again.
Read: lines 690–691.
Monks who are astonished that anybody came. In Pe-t'oo, when they saw their fellow-disciples from Ts'in passing along, they were moved with great pity and sympathy, and said: How is it that these men from a border-land should have learned to become monks, and come for the sake of our doctrines from such a distance in search of the Law of Buddha?4
What a person is, seen from the inside of the world Fa-hien came to. A man from the borders. Not an enemy, not a barbarian to be corrected — somebody they pity for having so far to come. The whole chapter is four sentences and the sentence in the middle of it is the one that tells you where he stands in their eyes.
How people should relate. They supplied them with what they needed and treated them in accordance with the rules of the Law.4 Not in accordance with their feelings. The pity is in the first half of the paragraph and the procedure is in the second, and it is the procedure that gets him fed.
What is worth having. Whatever it is that could make a man from the edge of the world walk here for it. The question is left as a question, and the men asking it are the ones who already have the thing.
What is real, what makes things happen, how you know, the shape of time. Not in the range read (line 714). The chapter is one exchange, and both dimensions it carries are social.
Read: lines 714–715.
A king who takes his hat off and sits on the floor. Everywhere from the Sandy Desert, in all the countries of India, the kings had been firm believers. When they make their offerings to a community of monks they take off their royal caps and, along with their relatives and ministers, supply the food with their own hands. That done, the king has a carpet spread for himself on the ground and sits down in front of the chairman. They dare not presume to sit on couches in front of the community.5
How people should relate. There is a seat a king may not take, and everybody in the room knows which one. And the reason given is not law or fear — it is precedent: the laws and ways according to which the kings presented their offerings when Buddha was in the world have been handed down to the present day.5
How the country is run, and this is the most political paragraph in the book. All south of Mathura is called the Middle Kingdom. The cold and heat are finely tempered and there is neither hoarfrost nor snow. The people are numerous and happy. They do not have to register their households or attend to any magistrates and their rules. Only those who cultivate the royal land pay a portion of the grain from it. If they want to go, they go; if they want to stay on, they stay.6
The king governs without decapitation or other corporal punishments. Criminals are simply fined, lightly or heavily, according to the circumstances of each case. Even in cases of repeated attempts at wicked rebellion, they only have their right hands cut off. The king's bodyguards and attendants all have salaries.6
That is a description of a state written by a man from one that registered households and executed people. He does not compare the two. He lists what is absent — the registry, the magistrates, the block — and then names the one tax and the one penalty.
What is worth having, and what everybody agrees not to do. Throughout the whole country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions or garlic. They do not keep pigs and fowls and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butchers' shops and no dealers in drink. In buying and selling they use cowries.6
And the exception the whole arrangement is built on. The only exception is that of the Chandalas — the name for those who are held to be wicked men, and live apart from others. When they enter the gate of a city or a market-place they strike a piece of wood to make themselves known, so that men know and avoid them and do not come into contact with them. Only the Chandalas are fishermen and hunters, and sell flesh meat.6
A country where nobody kills is a country where a named group does the killing and announces itself with a rattle so the others can step back. The purity of the majority is a job, and somebody holds it. Fa-hien lists the rattle in the same sentence as the empty butchers' shops and the cowrie currency, as one more fact about how the markets there work. He is describing a market with no meat in it and the men who bring the meat, and he does not put those two facts against each other.
How you make a thing outlast a reign. Metal. After the pari-nirvana, the kings of the various countries and the heads of the Vaisyas built viharas for the monks and endowed them with fields, houses, gardens and orchards, along with the resident populations and their cattle — the grants being engraved on plates of metal, so that afterwards they were handed down from king to king, without any daring to annul them, and they remain even to the present time.7
What a person is, and how a stranger is received. When stranger monks arrive, the old residents meet them, carry their clothes and alms-bowl for them, give them water to wash their feet and oil to anoint them, and the liquid food permitted outside the regular hours. When the stranger has had a very brief rest, they ask the number of years he has been a monk, and after that he gets a sleeping apartment with its fittings according to his regular order, and everything is done for him that the rules prescribe.8
Seniority is counted in years of ordination, not in age or birth, and the question is asked after the feet are washed and before the bed is assigned. A man's place in a house he has never entered is settled by a number he brings with him. Nobody checks it, and nobody could. The oil and the food come first, unconditionally, and the ranking comes only after the stranger has already been fed.
What is worth having, sorted by who you are. The topes are for Sariputtra, Maha-maudgalyayana and Ananda — and also for the Abhidharma, the Vinaya and the Sutras.9 Three men and three bodies of text, given the same kind of monument.
Then each class of person offers at its own: the nuns mostly at Ananda's tope, because it was he who requested the World-honoured one to allow females to quit their families; the novices mostly to Rahula; the professors of the Abhidharma to the Abhidharma and those of the Vinaya to the Vinaya; the mahayana students to the Prajna-paramita, to Manjusri and to Kwan-she-yin. Every year there is one such offering, and each class has its own day for it.10
The shape of time. A month after the annual rest, the families that are looking for blessing stimulate one another to make offerings, and send round the liquid food that may be taken outside the ordinary hours. All the monks come together in a great assembly and preach the Law, and then offerings are made at Sariputtra's tope with all kinds of flowers and incense. All through the night lamps are kept burning, and skilful musicians are employed to perform.11
What is real. From the crossing of the Indus to Southern India and on to the Southern Sea, forty or fifty thousand li, all is level plain. There are no large hills with streams among them; there are simply the waters of the rivers.12
How you know the whole thing is intact. From the nirvana of Buddha, the forms of ceremony, laws, and rules practised by the sacred communities have been handed down from one generation to another without interruption.10 That is the sentence Fa-hien walked six years to be able to write, and it is the answer to the question he set out with in chapter I.
Read: lines 724–742.
A woman who works out how to be first in the queue. The kings of eight countries with their ministers and people had collected in clouds, thirstily looking up, waiting for Buddha to come down. The bhikshuni Utpala thought in her heart: To-day the kings, with their ministers and people, will all be meeting and welcoming Buddha. I am but a woman; how shall I succeed in being the first to see him?13
Buddha immediately, by his spirit-like power, changed her into the appearance of a holy Chakravartti king, and she was the foremost of all in doing reverence to him.13
How people should relate. The obstacle is real and it is not removed. She is not told the crowd will part for a nun, or that being first does not matter. She is issued a temporary king. The system stays exactly as it was and one woman is put through it in disguise, with the disguise supplied from above.
What is real. Three flights of steps let down out of the sky — the middle one of the seven precious substances with Buddha on it, a silver flight on the right where the king of Brahma-loka attended with a white chowry, purple gold on the left where Sakra attended with an umbrella. When he had come down, all three disappeared into the ground except seven steps, which stayed visible.14
How you test a thing like that. You dig. King Asoka, wishing to know where the ends of the steps rested, sent men down to look. They went down to the yellow springs without reaching the bottom of the steps, and from this the king received an increase to his reverence and faith.14 He excavated to the water table, found no end, and believed more than before. The investigation is real and the result is read as confirmation.
How a dispute is settled. By a lion. Teachers of another doctrine once argued with the sramanas over the right to this place as a residence, and the sramanas were having the worst of the argument — so both sides took an oath that if the place did indeed belong to the sramanas there should be some marvellous attestation of it. When the words had been spoken, the lion on top of Asoka's pillar gave a great roar. Their opponents were frightened, bowed to the decision, and withdrew.15
Both sides agreed the terms first. The losing side of the argument called for the test, and the other side accepted the format. It is a wager on a signal, entered into by mutual consent, and the verdict is honoured.
What makes things happen. A dragon farms for them. Where the monks live there is a white-eared dragon which acts the part of danapati to the community — causing abundant harvests in the country and the enriching rains to come in season, without any calamity, so that the monks enjoy their repose and ease.16 The word is the same one used of the king of Chang-yih in chapter I. A dragon can hold the office of donor.
And what they owe it back. In gratitude they have made it a dragon-house with a carpet to sit on, and appointed a diet of blessing which they present for its nourishment. Every day they set apart three of their number to go to its house and eat there.16
The shape of the year, and how it ends. Whenever the summer retreat is over, the dragon changes its form and appears as a small snake with white spots at the side of its ears. As soon as the monks recognise it they fill a copper vessel with cream, put the creature into it, and carry it round from the one with the highest seat at their tables to the one with the lowest, when it appears as if saluting them. When it has been taken round it immediately disappears. Every year it thus comes forth once.16
The dragon is carried down the seniority order, top to bottom, and greets every man in it. The ranking that decides where a stranger sleeps is the same ranking a snake is carried along. It happens once a year, at the same point in the calendar, and then the creature is gone. Three men eat in its house every day for the rest of the year, and it does not appear to them.
What is worth having. The country is very productive, the people prosperous and happy beyond comparison, and when people of other countries come they are exceedingly attentive to them all and supply them with what they need.17 Prosperity and hospitality are given as one fact.
What a person is. Somebody who can be counted, up to a point. At the Great Heap monastery there are a hundred small topes at which a man may keep counting a whole day without getting to know their exact number. If he is firmly bent on knowing, he will put a man beside each tope — and then, counting the men, whether they are many or few, he will still not get to know the number.18
The workaround is a good one. Put a man on each tope and the topes stop being the thing you have to count. It fails anyway, and Fa-hien records the attempt as well as the failure. He does not say who tried it, or how many men they had, or what number they kept arriving at.
And a test set by a hostile king. A good spirit constantly keeps a tope swept and watered without any labour of man. A king of corrupt views said: since you are able to do this, I will lead a multitude of troops and reside there till the dirt and filth has increased and accumulated, and see whether you can cleanse it away or not. The spirit raised a great wind, which blew the filth away and made the place pure.19
Two experiments in one chapter, both proposed by sceptics, both run, both settled against the sceptic. Asoka's dig, though, was a man asking a question he wanted answered, and this king is picking a fight. The wind is the only violent thing in the whole chapter, and it is aimed at rubbish. Nobody is hurt and the king is not punished, which is not how the same story would end in most places.
Read: lines 810–834.
What he actually said, in six words. Six or seven li west of the city, on the northern bank of the Ganges, is the place where Buddha preached to his disciples. It has been handed down that what he talked about there was the bitterness and vanity of life as impermanent and uncertain, and that the body is as a bubble or foam on the water.20
What is real. A body with the density of foam. It is the one place in twenty-six chapters where the content of a sermon is reported rather than the site of one, and the content is that the thing standing in front of you will not hold.
How you know. It has been handed down. No text is named and no chain of teachers. The formula is the same one he used at the Indus for the arrival of the Law in the east, and it is doing the same work: this is what the people here say, and I am writing it as that.
What is worth having. A place where words were said, marked in stone. At this spot a tope was erected and still exists — and across the Ganges, three yojanas south, a village with places where Buddha preached, sat, and walked, all of them with topes on them.21 Preaching, sitting and walking are three separately markable acts.
How people should relate, what a person is, what makes things happen, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 890–894), beyond the two monasteries of hinayana students in the city and the seven yojanas from the Dragon vihara, which he left after the summer retreat.
Read: lines 890–894.
A twig that will not be got rid of. Buddha chewed his willow branch and stuck it in the ground, and it grew up seven cubits and stayed at that height, neither increasing nor diminishing.22
What is real. A living thing that has stopped. A tree that grows is ordinary and a tree that is dead is ordinary; this one is fixed, which is the detail that makes it a marker rather than a plant.
What makes things happen. Persistence, against people. The Brahmans with their contrary doctrines became angry and jealous. Sometimes they cut the tree down, sometimes they plucked it up, and cast it to a distance, but it grew again on the same spot as at first.22
Not once. Sometimes, and sometimes — a repeated campaign over years, reported without heat and without a name attached to either side. The tree does not punish anybody. It comes back.
How people should relate. Two communities in the same town, one of which periodically digs up the other's monument. Fa-hien records this as the local condition and moves on in the next clause to the four Buddhas who walked and sat here and the tope that is still existing.22
What is worth having, what a person is, how you know, the shape of time. Not in the range read (line 908), beyond the three yojanas south-east and the fact that the tope still stands.
Read: lines 908–909.
A great city with two hundred families left in it. In Sravasti the inhabitants were few and far between, amounting in all to only a few more than two hundred families — the city where king Prasenajit ruled, where the old vihara of Maha-prajapati stood, where the well and walls of Sudatta's house are, and where the Angulimalya became an arhat.23
What is worth having, and what it cost. Sudatta bought the park by covering it with gold coins.24 The measure of the purchase is the surface area of the ground, paid in a single layer, and that is how the transaction is remembered rather than as a sum.
What is real — the first image, and it moves. When Buddha had gone up to the heaven to preach for his mother, Prasenajit, longing to see him, had an image carved in sandalwood and put in the place where he usually sat. When Buddha came back into the vihara, he said to it: Return to your seat. After I have attained to pari-nirvana, you will serve as a pattern to the four classes of my disciples. And on this the image returned to its seat. This was the very first of all the images, and the one that men subsequently copied.25
Then Buddha moved out and lived in a small vihara twenty paces away, on the south side, in a different place from the one with the image in it. He gives it his seat and goes elsewhere.
What makes things happen. A rat with a lamp-wick in its mouth. The Jetavana was originally of seven storeys, and the kings and people of the countries around vied with one another in their offerings — silken streamers and canopies hung about it, flowers scattered, incense burnt, lamps lit so as to make the night as bright as the day, day after day without ceasing. A rat carrying a lamp-wick set one of the streamers on fire, which caught the vihara, and all seven storeys were consumed.26
The devotion is the fuel. Making the night as bright as the day means several hundred open flames in a wooden building hung with silk, kept going every night without a break. Nothing in the chapter is blamed and no lesson is drawn. The practice that honours the place burns it down, and the two facts sit in consecutive sentences.
The kings and their officers and people were all very sad, supposing the sandalwood image had gone. But after four or five days, when the door of a small vihara on the east was opened, the original image was seen. They were all greatly rejoiced and co-operated in restoring the building — and when they had got two storeys up, they moved the image back to its former place.26
What a person is, and the moment the book turns inward. When Fa-hien and Tao-ching first arrived at the Jetavana and thought how the World-honoured one had formerly lived there for twenty-five years, painful reflections arose in their minds. Born in a border-land, they had travelled through so many kingdoms with their like-minded friends; some of those friends had returned home, and some had died, proving the impermanence and uncertainty of life; and today they saw the place where Buddha had lived, now unoccupied by him. They were melancholy through their pain of heart.27
He uses the doctrine of chapter XVIII to describe his own dead companions, in the same words. It is the only place in the book where he applies a teaching to himself. Twenty-five years of Buddha's residence is what he came to stand in, and what he finds is an empty room. The friends who set out with him are accounted for in one clause — some went home, some died — and then he goes on.
How people should relate. The monks came out and asked what kingdom they were from. We are come from the land of Han. And the monks sighed: Strange that men of a border country should be able to come here in search of our Law! Then they said to one another: During all the time that we, preceptors and monks, have succeeded to one another, we have never seen men of Han, followers of our system, arrive here.28
The same astonishment as in chapter XV, said by different men eight yojanas further on, and now with a length of time attached to it. Nobody in the succession has seen this before.
How you know who won an argument. By where the lamps end up. Opposite the vihara built on the site of Buddha's great debate stood a rival temple of the same height, called "The Shadow Covered" — because when the sun was in the west the shadow of Buddha's vihara fell across it, and when the sun was in the east that building's shadow was diverted north and never fell on Buddha's.29
The rival believers employed men to watch their temple, sweep and water it, burn incense, light the lamps and present offerings — and in the morning the lamps were found to have been removed to the vihara of Buddha. The Brahmans were indignant and said: Those Sramanas take out lamps and use them for their own service of Buddha, but we will not stop our service for you! So that night they kept watch themselves, and saw the deva spirits they served take the lamps and go three times round the vihara of Buddha and present offerings, and then disappear. On which they left their families and became monks.29
They suspected theft, set a watch, and caught their own gods doing it.
How people should relate, across a doctrinal line. In the Middle Kingdom there are ninety-six sorts of views erroneous and different from our system, all of which recognise this world and the future world and the connexion between them. Each has its multitude of followers, and they all beg their food — only they do not carry the alms-bowl. They also seek to acquire the blessing of good deeds on unfrequented ways, setting up houses of charity by the road where rooms, couches, beds, food and drink are supplied to travellers and to monks coming and going as guests, the only difference being in the time for which those parties remain.30
Ninety-six rival systems, all running free hostels on the empty stretches of road, taking in each other's travellers, and the sole distinction Fa-hien records is the length of stay. He has just walked those roads. He notes one other difference and it is a small one: they beg their food like his own men do, only without carrying the bowl. That is his whole account of ninety-six ways of being wrong, and it is a description of their catering.
The shape of time. Around the Jetavana there were once ninety-eight monasteries, all with monks in them except one place that was vacant.30 And the followers of Devadatta are still existing, making offerings to the three previous Buddhas but not to Sakyamuni.31 A schism from the founder's lifetime is still keeping its own calendar of offerings nine hundred years later.
Read: lines 924–952.
Three men, and for each of them the same two places. Kasyapa Buddha was born at Too-wei; topes were erected at the place where he and his father met, and at the place where he attained pari-nirvana. Krakuchanda Buddha was born at Na-pei-kea; topes at the place where he and his father met, and where he attained pari-nirvana. Kanakamuni Buddha at a town less than a yojana north; topes at the place where he and his father met, and where he attained pari-nirvana.32
The shape of time. A life has a fixed set of markable points, and the set does not change between Buddhas. Three of them, three times the identical pair, in three consecutive sentences — this is what a career looks like, and the previous holders of the post left the same marks in different fields.
What a person is. Somebody who leaves his father and meets him again. Of everything in a Buddha's life, the moment chosen for a monument alongside the death is the reunion with the man whose household he walked out of. Chapter XXII will say it again about Sakyamuni: where, after he had attained to Wisdom, Buddha returned and saw the king, his father.
What is real. Over the entire relic of the whole body of Kasyapa Tathagata a great tope was erected.32 The whole body, not a portion — which sets up chapter XXIV, where eight kings divide one.
How people should relate, what makes things happen, how you know, what is worth having. Not in the range read (lines 1018–1022). The chapter is a list of six sites and its content is the pattern they make.
Read: lines 1018–1022.
The town he was born in has nobody in it. In Kapilavastu there was neither king nor people. All was mound and desolation. Of inhabitants there were only some monks and a score or two of families of the common people.33
What is real. A place that is entirely a list of things that happened in it. Where the old palace stood, images of the prince and his mother. Where he entered his mother's womb on a white elephant. Where he turned his carriage round on seeing the sick man, having gone out by the eastern gate. Where the rishi inspected the marks of Buddhaship on him as an infant. Where he tossed the struck-down elephant aside. Where five hundred Sakyas quitted their families and did reverence to Upali while the earth shook and moved in six different ways. Where he sat under a nyagrodha tree, which is still standing.34
And one that is still in use. Where he shot an arrow to the south-east, and it went thirty li, then entered the ground and made a spring come forth — which men subsequently fashioned into a well from which travellers might drink.34 The miracle got plumbed. It is the only site in this chapter that anybody does anything with.
How people should relate. Where Buddha preached his Law to the devas, and the four deva kings and others kept the four doors of the hall, so that even the king, his father, could not enter.34 The one man in the world with a claim on him is the one kept out.
What a person is, and what a lineage is worth. Where king Vaidurya slew the seed of Sakya, and they all in dying became Srotapannas. A tope was erected at this last place, which is still existing.34 The family is exterminated and the deaths are counted as entries onto the path. Both halves of that sentence are given in the same tone as the arrow and the tree.
The shape of a life, stated as a rule. There are four places of regular and fixed occurrence in the history of all Buddhas — first, where they attained perfect Wisdom; second, where they turned the wheel of the Law; third, where they preached, argued for righteousness, and defeated the advocates of erroneous doctrines; fourth, where they came down after going up to the Trayastrimsas heaven to preach for the benefit of their mothers. Other places became remarkable according to the manifestations made at them at particular times.35
Four fixed points and an open list. Chapter XXI showed the pattern and here it is written out as a specification. Every Buddha, past and future, leaves those four marks in whatever country he happens to be born in. The rest of a life makes sites only where something happened to happen.
What is worth having. The water. At Lumbini the queen came out of the pond, walked twenty paces, lifted her hand, took hold of a branch of a tree, and with her face to the east gave birth. When he fell to the ground he immediately walked seven paces. Two dragon-kings appeared and washed his body, and at the place where they did so a well was immediately formed — and from it, as well as from the pond where the queen bathed, the monks even now constantly take the water, and drink it.36
What makes things happen, and how you know. Not in the range read (lines 1036–1048), except that the sites are pointed out rather than found. What the chapter closes on is practical: the country is a great scene of empty desolation, the inhabitants are few and far between, and on the roads people have to be on their guard against white elephants and lions, and should not travel incautiously.37
Read: lines 1036–1048.
A dragon that outbids a king. The king of Rama got one portion of the relics of Buddha's body and built a tope over it. Beside it was a pool, and in the pool a dragon, which constantly kept watch over the tope and presented offerings to it day and night.38
When Asoka came into the world he wished to destroy the eight original topes and build eighty-four thousand instead. He had thrown down seven of them and meant to destroy this one too. Then the dragon showed itself and took the king into its palace — and when he had seen all the things provided there for offerings, it said: If you are able with your offerings to exceed these, you can destroy the tope, and take it all away. I will not contend with you.38
The king knew that such appliances for offerings were not to be had anywhere in the world, and thereupon returned without carrying out his purpose.
How a conflict gets settled. By showing the other party the accounts and inviting him to beat them. No force is used and no refusal is issued. The dragon proposes a standard, opens its books, and states in advance that it will not fight. Asoka does his own valuation and withdraws.
This is the second time in the book a king with a sufficient army stops on a non-military ground. In chapter XII the elephants would not stand up; here the arithmetic does not work. Neither king is beaten and both give up.
What makes things happen, when nobody is doing the job. The ground about the tope became overgrown and there was nobody to sprinkle and sweep it — but a herd of elephants came regularly, bringing water in their trunks to water the ground, and various kinds of flowers and incense, which they presented at the tope.39
What a person is, and the one career move in the book. A devotee came from another kingdom to worship at the tope. When he met the elephants he was greatly alarmed and hid among the trees. But when he saw them go through the offerings in the most proper manner, the thought filled him with great sadness — that there should be no monastery here whose inmates might serve the tope, and that the elephants have to do the watering and the sweeping.40
Forthwith he gave up the great prohibitions by which he was bound, and resumed the status of a Sramanera. With his own hands he cleared away the grass and trees, put the place in good order, and made it pure and clean. By the power of his exhortations he prevailed on the king of the country to form a residence for monks, and when that was done he became head of the monastery.40
He demoted himself. A fully ordained monk gives up the higher rule and goes back to being a novice, because a novice may do the physical work of clearing ground that his own vows forbade. And then he runs the house he built. At the present day there are monks residing in it, and in all the succession from that time till now, there has always been a Sramanera head of the establishment.40
The exception became the constitution. Every head of that monastery since has held the junior rank on purpose, because the founder did. Nobody has been promoted into the job and nobody has restored the older arrangement. A house whose whole reason for existing is that the elephants should not have to sweep is run, permanently, by a novice.
What is worth having. Somebody to do the sweeping. The elephants were doing it properly — Fa-hien says so — and it was still not right, because it is a thing men owe.
What is real, how you know, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 1100–1104), beyond the eight original portions and the eighty-four thousand that Asoka meant to replace them with. This event is of recent occurrence, he adds of the devotee, which is the only place in the book he dates something to his own century.40
Read: lines 1100–1104.
A body divided eight ways. At Kusanagara, between two trees on the river bank, is the place where the World-honoured one, with his head to the north, attained pari-nirvana. Also the place where Subhadra, the last of his converts, became an arhat; where they made offerings to him in his coffin of gold for seven days; where the Vajrapani laid aside his golden club; and where the eight kings divided the relics of the burnt body. At all of these, topes and monasteries were built and all are now existing.41
What is real. A death that is also a distribution. Chapter XXI had a whole body under one tope; here the body is portioned and each portion is a claim, and the place where the portioning happened is itself marked.
What a person is. Somebody who sends back his horse. Four yojanas east is the place where the heir-apparent sent back Chandaka with the white horse, and a tope was erected there too.42 The renunciation is marked at the point where he dismissed the servant, not where he took the robe.
How people should relate, when somebody will not let you go. Twelve yojanas south-east is the place where the Lichchhavis wished to follow Buddha to his pari-nirvana. When he would not listen to them, and they kept cleaving to him, unwilling to go away, he made to appear a large and deep ditch which they could not cross over, and gave them his alms-bowl, as a pledge of his regard, thus sending them back to their families. A stone pillar was erected there with an account of the event engraved on it.43
The refusal and the gift are the same act. He makes the ground itself say no, and then hands over the one object he uses every day so that the no cannot be read as rejection. The alms-bowl is the same class of object as the one eight elephants could not move in chapter XII.
What is worth having, and who is left. In the city the inhabitants are few and far between, comprising only the families belonging to the different societies of monks.44 A second town, after Kapilavastu, whose whole remaining population is the support staff of its own memorials.
What makes things happen, how you know, the shape of time. Not in the range read (lines 1124–1132), beyond the seven days of offerings and the yojana counts between sites.
Read: lines 1124–1132.
A woman on a wall, feeding a thousand soldiers. The inferior wife of a king on the Ganges brought forth a ball of flesh. The superior wife, jealous, said you have brought forth a thing of evil omen, and it was immediately put into a wooden box and thrown into the river.45
Downstream another king saw the box floating, had it brought to him, opened it, and found a thousand little boys, upright and complete, and each one different from the others. He brought them up. They grew tall and large and very daring and strong, crushing all opposition in every expedition they undertook — and by and by they attacked the kingdom of their real father.
He became greatly distressed. His inferior wife asked what was making him so, and he told her: that king has a thousand sons, daring and strong beyond compare, and he wishes to attack my kingdom. She said: you need not be sad and sorrowful. Only make a high gallery on the wall of the city on the east; and when the thieves come, I shall be able to make them retire.46
When the enemies came she called down from the tower: you are my sons; why are you acting so unnaturally and rebelliously? And when they did not believe her: look, all of you, towards me, and open your mouths. She pressed her breasts with her two hands and each sent forth five hundred jets of milk, which fell into the mouths of the thousand sons. The thieves thus knew that she was their mother, and laid down their bows and weapons.46
How you prove a claim. With the body, in public, at range. She does not produce a token or a witness. She makes the demonstration herself from a structure she asked to have built for the purpose, and it works on a thousand men at once because every one of them receives his own portion of the evidence.
What makes things happen. Both fathers then fell into reflection and both got to be Pratyeka Buddhas, and the tope of the two of them is still existing.46 The two kings who were about to fight each other end up in the same category, and the woman who stopped the war is not said to have gained anything by it.
The shape of time. The thousand little boys were the thousand Buddhas of this Bhadra-kalpa.47 And in a subsequent age, when the World-honoured one had become Buddha, he said to his disciples: this is the place where I in a former age laid down my bow and weapons. It was thus that men subsequently got to know the fact and raised the tope, which in this way received its name.47
Same mechanism as chapter IX: he returns and identifies the ground, and the marker goes up afterwards. But here he is identifying a spot where he himself surrendered, as one of a thousand brothers, before he was anybody. The tope is named for the weapons rather than for the man, and the men who built it were told what had happened by the one who put the weapons down. It is a monument to somebody backing off.
What a person is — the failure at Vaisali. By the side of that same tope, Buddha, having given up the idea of living longer, told Ananda that in three months he would attain pari-nirvana. And king Mara had so fascinated and stupefied Ananda that he was not able to ask Buddha to remain longer in this world.48
There was a moment when it could have gone otherwise and the man in the room was not able to speak. It is the only place in the book where somebody's silence changes the outcome. Ananda is not blamed for it and no fault of his is named. A king fascinated and stupefied him, and the three months ran.
How you know — and this is what he came for. Three or four li east there is a tope commemorating this: a hundred years after the pari-nirvana, some bhikshus of Vaisali went wrong in the matter of the disciplinary rules in ten particulars, and appealed for their justification to what they said were the words of Buddha. On which the arhats and the bhikshus observant of the rules, seven hundred monks in all, examined afresh and collated the collection of disciplinary books.49
That is the procedure. A dispute over ten points of the rule, a claim on both sides to have the founder's words, and the answer is seven hundred men sitting down together and going through the texts again. It is the same operation Fa-hien is performing with his own feet, nine hundred years later and four thousand miles from home.
What is worth having. Ambapali built a vihara in the city in honour of Buddha, which is standing now as it was at first, and gave him a garden three li south of the city to reside in.50 And when he was leaving by the west gate he turned round, looked at the city on his right, and said: here I have taken my last walk. Men subsequently built a tope at that spot.50
What is real. A place marked because somebody looked back at it.
Read: lines 1160–1172.
A man caught between two armies who splits himself in half. When Ananda was going from Magadha to Vaisali, wishing his pari-nirvana to take place there, the devas informed king Ajatasatru, who immediately pursued him in his own grand carriage with a body of soldiers and reached the river. The Lichchhavis of Vaisali had heard he was coming to their city and came out to meet him. In this way they all arrived together at the river.51
What makes things happen — the calculation, and it is a social one. Ananda considered that if he went forward king Ajatasatru would be very angry, and if he went back the Lichchhavis would resent his conduct.52 That is the whole reasoning given. Not doctrine, not a vision, not an instruction. Two parties on two banks, each with a claim on his body, and no third bank.
What he did. In the very middle of the river he burnt his body in a fiery ecstasy of Samadhi, and his pari-nirvana was attained. He divided his body also into two, leaving the half of it on each bank; so that each of the two kings got one half as a relic, and took it back to his own capital, and there raised a tope over it.52
What a person is. Divisible, and worth fighting over. Chapter XXIV had eight kings dividing a body after a death; here a man performs the division himself, in advance, to prevent the fight. He does not choose a side, refuse both, or slip away. He arranges for both claims to be satisfied exactly.
What is worth having. Half a corpse, and a tope to put it in. Both kings go home content, which is the outcome he engineered.
How people should relate. Two rulers who would have gone to war over a relic instead build one monument each, and the man they were competing for made that the only available result.
What is real, how you know, the shape of time. Not in the range read (line 1206), beyond the four yojanas east and the confluence of the five rivers where it happens.
Read: lines 1206–1207.
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, and the dying man named it. Do you immediately go away, that we do not all die here.1 The other course is stated in his refusal of it: stay, try to warm him, carry him down. Hwuy-king rules it out on the grounds that it kills everybody, and Fa-hien accepts the ruling without argument.
What makes this a real fork rather than a formality is chapter XII, four pages earlier, where Tao-ching stayed behind with the same man when he first fell ill at Nagara and nursed him back onto the road. The precedent existed and had worked once. It is refused on a mountainside because the conditions are different, and the man who refuses it is the one it would have been done for.
[SPECULATIVE]Engrave the grant on metal and the next king cannot quietly stop honouring it. Fields, houses, gardens, orchards, and the resident populations with their cattle, cut into plates and handed from reign to reign, without any daring to annul them. Applies when the beneficiary cannot defend the endowment by force and the succession is frequent — a durable, public, unforgeable record shifts the cost of revocation from the holder to the revoker, who now has to be seen destroying something. Fails against a ruler who wants the fight, and against dynastic breaks where the new house owes nothing to the old plates. Decision type: succession.
Ask the number of years, not the name. A stranger monk gets his feet washed first and his rank assigned second, from a single number he carries with him. Applies when people arrive from unconnected places and must be slotted into a hierarchy immediately, with no shared registry to check them against. Fails where the number can be inflated and there is no way to test it — which is exactly the hole the Vaisali council of chapter XXV had to convene over, when men appealed to what they said were the words of Buddha. Decision type: alliance formation.
[SPECULATIVE]A Kautilyan advisor on the Middle Kingdom's arrangements. The Arthashastra takes the visible reach of the state as the thing to be maximised — registration, informers, revenue, the ruler's knowledge of who is where. See What a Mauryan Statecraft Manual Took For Granted. Fa-hien is standing in the same country a few centuries later and reporting the opposite: no household registration, no magistrates to attend, one tax on royal land, and if a man wants to go he goes.
The counsel would be that this cannot be what it looks like, and it would be worth listening to. What Fa-hien is describing is a state that has moved its record-keeping and its coercion off the population and onto two other things — the metal plates that fix the endowments, and the Chandalas who do the killing and announce themselves with a rattle. Nothing softened. The register moved from the people to the land, and the enforcement moved from the magistrate to a caste. A Kautilyan reader would find the machinery immediately and would not call it lighter.
[SPECULATIVE]Open your books and invite the stronger party to beat them. The dragon did not refuse Asoka, threaten him, or bargain. It showed him the standing offerings, set exceeding them as the price of demolition, and said in advance that it would not contend. Applies when your position is genuinely unmatchable and the other party is capable of checking — the concession has to be real, or the invitation is a bluff and gets called. Fails against somebody who does not care about the standard you named. Asoka stopped because he wanted the relic housed better, not merely moved; a king who only wanted it moved would have knocked the tope down. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.
[SPECULATIVE]A constructed one. Suppose the devotee had done the obvious thing and petitioned the king for a monastery without giving up his own standing first. First order, he is one more visiting monk with a request, and the request costs the king money for a site nobody local is attending. Second order, the elephants keep sweeping, because the thing that actually moved the king was a man already on his knees in the grass having demoted himself to do it. Third order, and this is where it thins — somebody else eventually founds the house anyway, since the relic is real and the traffic exists. What would not have survived is the rule that every head of that monastery holds the junior rank. That is a constitution, and it came from one man's decision about his own status rather than from the founding grant.
[SPECULATIVE]When two claimants cannot both be satisfied, divide the thing they want rather than choosing between them. Ananda's answer to a river with an army on one bank and a delegation on the other was to make himself into two relics. Applies when the asset is divisible without being destroyed, and when the claimants want possession rather than exclusivity — both kings wanted a tope, and two topes are not worth less than one. Fails completely where the point of the claim is that the other side does not have it, which is the ordinary case and the reason this looks stranger than it is. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.