Chapters XXVII–XL of Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, in James Legge's translation — Patna and Rajagriha, Gaya, Benares, Ceylon, and the voyage home. 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 2 — Chapters XIV–XXVI · 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
Fa-hien walks into Patna and reports that the palace was not built by men. The royal halls in the middle of the city, which exist now as of old, were all made by spirits Asoka employed. They piled the stones, reared the walls and gates, and did the carving and inlaid work — in a way which no human hands of this world could accomplish.1 That is his account of the most famous building he has seen so far, given flatly and in the same breath as the distances. What is real, here, includes a labour force you cannot hire.
The hill inside the city is the sharper story, and it turns on a king who cannot get what he wants. Asoka's younger brother had become an arhat and lived on Gridhra-kuta, finding his delight in solitude and quiet. The king wanted him in the family compound, where all his wants could be supplied. The brother would not come, because of his delight in the stillness of the mountain. So the king said: only accept my invitation, and I will make a hill for you inside the city.2
He then did it by a trick that is worth following. He provided the materials of a feast, called the spirits, and announced that they would all receive his invitation tomorrow — but that as there were no mats for them to sit on, each one should bring his own seat. Next day they came, each bringing a great rock like a wall, four or five paces square. When the sitting was over the king had them pile the stones into a hill, and at the foot of it he made an apartment out of five large square stones, more than thirty cubits long and twenty wide.2 He got a mountain built by inviting his guests to dinner and telling them to bring a chair.
What a person is, here, is somebody a king may not sit beside. The great Brahman Radha-sami lived by himself in spotless purity, and the king honoured him and served him as his teacher. When the king went to greet him he did not presume to sit down alongside him. And if in his love and reverence he took hold of the Brahman's hand, then as soon as he let go the Brahman made haste to pour water on it and wash it.3 The king accepts this, repeatedly. Radha-sami might be over fifty years old, and all the kingdom looked up to him.
The consequence of that one man is stated as a political fact:
By means of this one man, the Law of Buddha was widely made known, and the followers of other doctrines did not find it in their power to persecute the body of monks in any way.3
One teacher stands high enough that a king washes his hand after touching him. That is what keeps the rival schools off the monasteries. The protection is real and it does not go through a law.
How you know, in this city, is by resorting to it. Shamans of the highest virtue come from all quarters. So do students, and inquirers wishing to find out truth and the grounds of it. They all go to these two monasteries — one mahayana and one hinayana, six or seven hundred monks between them.4 The rules of demeanour and the scholastic arrangements in them are worth watching, he says. A resident Brahman teacher also called Manjusri is honoured by the most virtuous shamans in the kingdom and by the mahayana monks alike.
How people should relate, in this country, has an address you can walk to. The heads of the Vaisya families establish in the cities houses for dispensing charity and medicines. All the poor and destitute in the country go to those houses — orphans, widowers and childless men, maimed people and cripples, and everyone who is diseased. They are provided with every kind of help, and doctors examine their diseases. They get the food and medicines their cases require and are made to feel at ease — and when they are better, they go away of themselves.5
Nobody discharges them and nobody counts the days. The clause that closes the description is the one that tells you what the house is for: it is not a place people are kept, it is a place people leave when the leaving is possible.
The shape of the year is a two-night visit. On the eighth day of the second month they hold a procession of images. They build four-storey structures on four-wheeled cars, twenty cubits high and shaped like a tope, wrapped in white cloth of hair and painted. Figures of devas go on them in gold, silver and lapis lazuli, and a niche on each of the four sides holds a seated Buddha with a Bodhisattva standing in attendance. There may be twenty cars, all imposing and each one different. The Brahmans come and invite the Buddhas to enter the city. They do so in order and remain two nights in it, with lamps burning all night and skilful music and offerings.6
What is worth having gets an inscription and a number on it, and the number is three. On the pillar in front of the great tope there is a text saying that Asoka gave the jambudvipa — the whole inhabited world — to the general body of all the monks, and then redeemed it from them with money. This he did three times.7 The same transaction as the quinquennial assembly of chapter V, run at the scale of a continent, by a king who evidently found it worth doing again twice.
What makes things happen is not addressed in the range read (lines 1222–1240) beyond the spirits and the one Brahman. The other pillar, at Ne-le, carries an inscription recording the things that led to the building of the city, with the number of the year, the day and the month.8 A date to the day, cut in stone, which is the one piece of record-keeping in the book that would satisfy a modern archivist.
Read: lines 1222–1240.
Sakra brought a musician to entertain the Buddha and then asked him forty-two questions, tracing them out with his finger one by one on the rock. The prints of his tracing are still there, and there is a monastery at the spot.9 What is real here is a conversation that left marks, and the marks are of the questions rather than the answers.
How you know something happened at a place, in this book, is by what it left on the ground. This chapter packs a list of such traces into a few hundred paces. The old city of Bimbisara is a circular space formed by five hills standing round it like a suburban wall, and inside it:
Sariputtra and Maudgalyayana first saw Upasena; the Nirgrantha made a pit of fire and poisoned the rice, and then invited Buddha to eat with him; king Ajatasatru made a black elephant intoxicated with liquor, wishing him to injure Buddha; and at the north-east corner of the city Jivaka built a vihara in the garden of Ambapali, and invited Buddha with his 1250 disciples to it, that he might there make his offerings to support them.10
Two assassination attempts and a dinner party are listed in one sentence, in the order of their position in the town. What a person is, in that list, is somebody with enemies who used food and animals. Neither the poisoner nor the king is condemned in the text and neither is given a consequence.
The shape of time, here, is a city that emptied. These places are still there as of old, but inside the city all is emptiness and desolation; no man dwells in it.10 New Rajagriha stands a few li away with two monasteries and a tope Ajatasatru built over his portion of the relics. The old city has nobody. It is the third town in the book, after Kapilavastu and Kusanagara, whose sites outlasted its people.
How people should relate is carried by one detail: at Nala, a yojana south-west, Sariputtra was born, and to it he also returned, and there he attained his pari-nirvana. A tope was built over the spot where his body was burned, and it is still in existence.11 The same shape as the three predecessor Buddhas in chapter XXI, who each have a monument where they met their fathers again. Going out and coming back is the pattern a life is expected to make.
What is worth having and what makes things happen are not in the range read (lines 1272–1277). What the chapter carries instead is a map: nine yojanas south-east, then a yojana south-west, then a yojana west, then four li south through a valley, and every turn of it lands on something that happened.
Read: lines 1272–1277.
A frightened man gets a hand through a wall. Ananda was sitting in meditation in a cavern when the deva Mara Pisuna took the form of a large vulture and settled in front of the opening to frighten him. Buddha, by his supernatural power, made a cleft in the rock, put his hand through it, and stroked Ananda's shoulder, so that his fear immediately passed away.12 The footprints of the bird and the cleft for the hand are both still there, and the hill is named after the vulture rather than the hand.
What a person is, in that account, is somebody who can be badly frightened while meditating and needs touching to stop it. Nothing is said to him. The remedy is physical, it comes through a wall that had to be opened for it, and the man who supplies it does not enter the room.
What is real is a hillside covered in the evidence of other people's practice. In front of the cavern are the places where the four Buddhas sat. Along the hill there are caverns of the arhats, one where each sat and meditated, amounting to several hundred in all.13 There is also the rock Devadatta threw down from the cliffs on the north, which hurt Buddha's toes. It is still there. The hall where he preached has been destroyed and only the foundations of the brick walls remain.
Then the book stops being a survey. In the New City Fa-hien bought incense-sticks, flowers, oil and lamps, and hired two bhikshus who had lived there a long time to carry them up to the peak. When he got there himself he made his offerings with the flowers and incense, and lit the lamps as the darkness began to come on.14
He felt melancholy, but restrained his tears and said: Here Buddha delivered the Surangama Sutra. I, Fa-hien, was born when I could not meet with Buddha; and now I only see the footprints which he has left, and the place where he lived, and nothing more.14
That is what is worth having, said plainly by the man who spent fifteen years getting to it: the footprints, the place, and nothing more. He has walked from Ch'ang-gan to a rock in Magadha to stand where a sermon was given, and the sentence he produces is an accounting of what is missing.
What he does about it is the shape of time in this chapter. With this, in front of the rock cavern, he chanted the Surangama Sutra, remained there over the night, and then returned towards the New City.14 He recites the text that was delivered on the spot, in the dark, on the ground where it happened, and stays till morning. The gap between his birth and the Buddha's life is not closed and the recitation is what he has instead.
How people should relate, in the practical sense, appears as a transaction: he bought the supplies in town and hired two long-resident monks to carry them. Pilgrimage has porters, and the porters are local men who know the path.
What makes things happen and how you know are not in the range read (lines 1306–1314) beyond the supernatural power that opened the rock.
Read: lines 1306–1314.
Five hundred arhats collected the Sutras in a cavern on the north of the hill, in the shade, after the nirvana. Three lofty seats had been prepared and grandly ornamented — Sariputtra on the left, Maudgalyayana on the right, Mahakasyapa president on the middle seat. Of the number of five hundred one was wanting. Ananda was then outside the door, and could not get in.15
That is how you know, at the origin: five hundred men in a room, three of them raised, and one man short because the man who had heard the most was locked out. Fa-hien reports the shortfall without explaining it. The same Ananda who could not speak at Vaisali in chapter XXV cannot get through the door here.
What is real is a hillside honeycombed with the same activity. Along the sides of the hill there are a very great many cells among the rocks where the various arhats sat and meditated. Near the road is the Karanda Bamboo garden, where the old vihara still stands with a company of monks who keep the ground about it swept and watered.16 Two or three li north of it is the Smasanam, the field of graves into which the dead are thrown.
Then the chapter's real subject, and it is a man arguing himself into cutting his own throat on a large black rock. He walked backwards and forwards on it thinking: this body is impermanent, a thing of bitterness and vanity, and which cannot be looked on as pure. I am weary of this body, and troubled by it as an evil.17 He grasped a knife and was about to kill himself.
Then he thought again — the World-honoured one laid down a prohibition against one's killing himself. And then a third time: yes, he did; but I now only wish to kill three poisonous thieves.17 Immediately, with the knife, he cut his throat.
What a person is, in that reasoning, is a container with an infestation in it. He does not deny the rule. He accepts it and then reclassifies the act, so that what is being killed is not himself but the three poisons living in him. The doctrine of chapter XVIII — the body as bubble and foam — supplies the first move, and the loophole supplies the second.
The verdict is delivered in the wound. With the first gash into the flesh he attained the state of a Srotapanna; when he had gone half through, he was an Anagamin; and when he had cut right through, he was an arhat and attained pari-nirvana, and died.18 Three ranks in one stroke, graded by depth. What makes things happen here is the cut itself, doing the work of years of practice, and Fa-hien records the promotion at each stage without comment on the argument that produced it.
How people should relate and what is worth having are not in the range read (lines 1334–1344), except that the man was alone on the rock and nobody stopped him.
Read: lines 1334–1344.
A man sits down in a cave and asks for a sign, gets one, and is told he is in the wrong place. He entered a cavern half a yojana north-east of Gaya and sat cross-legged with his face to the west. Then he said to himself: if I am to attain to perfect wisdom and become Buddha, let there be a supernatural attestation of it. On the wall of the rock there immediately appeared the shadow of a Buddha, rather more than three feet long. It is still bright at the present day.19
At that moment heaven and earth were greatly moved, and devas in the air spoke plainly:
This is not the place where any Buddha of the past, or he that is to come, has attained, or will attain, to perfect Wisdom. Less than half a yojana from this to the south-west will bring you to the patra tree, where all past Buddhas have attained, and all to come must attain, to perfect Wisdom.19
The site is fixed and the man is not consulted about it. What is real here is a geography that runs across all the Buddhas there have ever been and all there will be, in which one particular tree is the only place the thing can happen. The sign he asked for was granted in full — the shadow is still there — and it was granted at the wrong address.
Then they led the way forward, singing as they went, and he got up and walked after them. Thirty paces from the tree a deva gave him the grass of lucky omen, which he received and carried on. After fifteen paces five hundred green birds came flying towards him, went round him three times, and disappeared. He went forward to the patra tree, put the kusa grass at the foot of it, and sat down facing east.20
King Mara then sent three beautiful young ladies from the north to tempt him and came himself from the south to do the same. The Bodhisattva put his toes down on the ground, and the demon soldiers retired and dispersed, and the three young ladies were changed into old grandmothers.20 The whole assault is answered by putting a foot flat. What makes things happen, in the crisis of the story, is a gesture too small to see.
The shape of time in this chapter is seven days, counted over and over. Seven days contemplating the tree and experiencing the joy of release. Seven walking back and forth from west to east under it. Seven while the devas made a hall of the seven precious substances appear and presented offerings. Seven while the blind dragon Muchilinda encircled him. Then the nyagrodha tree, the square rock facing east, Brahma-deva's request, the four deva kings bringing their alms-bowls, the five hundred merchants with roasted flour and honey, and the conversion of the Kasyapa brothers with their thousand disciples. Topes at every one of them.21
What is worth having, in the three monasteries at the place, is a settled arrangement nobody has to renegotiate. The families of the people around supply the communities with all they require, so that there is no lack or stint. The disciplinary rules are strictly observed. The laws regulating their demeanour in sitting, rising and entering when the others are assembled are the ones practised by all the saints since Buddha was in the world.22
How you know the map is right: the places of the four great topes have been fixed, and handed down without break, since Buddha attained to nirvana.22 Born, attained Wisdom, began to move the wheel of the Law, attained pari-nirvana. Chapter XXII gave the four points as a rule about all Buddhas; here they are given as four addresses whose identification has never been interrupted.
Where the trees themselves come in is a small aside with a large claim in it. In Central India the cold and heat are so equally tempered that trees will live for several thousand and even for ten thousand years.23 That is why the rock and the tree where he ate the milk-gruel are there at the present day, and it is a natural explanation offered in the middle of a chapter full of devas.
Read: lines 1384–1400.
A boy playing in the road gave a Buddha a handful of earth. Kasyapa Buddha was walking past and begged food, and the boy pleasantly took a handful of earth and gave it to him. The Buddha took the earth and returned it to the ground he was walking on — and because of this the boy received the recompense of becoming a king of the iron wheel, to rule over the whole inhabited world.24
The gift was worthless and the return was an empire. What makes things happen, in this account of merit, has nothing to do with the value of what changes hands. The Buddha did not even keep it. He put it back on the path, and the transaction still counted.
What is real is a hell you can build with contractors. Making a tour of inspection, Asoka saw between the iron circuit of two hills a naraka for punishing wicked men. He asked his ministers what it was, and they said it belonged to Yama, king of demons. The king then thought within himself:
Even the king of demons is able to make a naraka in which to deal with wicked men; why should not I, who am the lord of men, make a naraka in which to deal with wicked men?25
They told him only a man of extreme wickedness could make it. So officers went out to look for one, and found him by a pond: tall and strong, with a black face, yellow hair and green eyes. He was hooking up fish with his feet, and calling birds and beasts to him, and shooting them as they came, so that not one escaped. What a person is, for this job, is measured by that last clause. The man's distinction is that nothing gets away from him.
The instructions he gave the man secretly turn on their last clause:
Make a square enclosure with high walls. Plant in it all kinds of flowers and fruits; make good ponds in it for bathing; make it grand and imposing in every way, so that men shall look to it with thirsting desire; make its gates strong and sure; and when any one enters, instantly seize him and punish him as a sinner, not allowing him to get out. Even if I should enter, punish me as a sinner in the same way, and do not let me go. I now appoint you master of that naraka.25
He built a trap that was beautiful on the outside and wrote himself into it. How people should relate, under that rule, is by a law with no exception at the top — which is exactly the thing Fa-hien reports of nowhere else in the book, and it is a hell.
Then a bhikshu begging his food walked in through the gate. The lictors were about to torture him and he asked, frightened, for a moment to eat his midday meal. While he waited, another man was thrust into a mortar and pounded until a red froth overflowed. As the bhikshu watched, the thought came to him of the impermanence and the painful suffering and insanity of this body, and how it is but as a bubble and as foam. Instantly he attained arhatship.26
That is the same sentence as chapter XVIII and the same one the man on the black rock used before cutting his throat. Here it arrives by watching somebody else be destroyed, and it arrives in the seconds before the same thing is done to him.
They threw him into a cauldron of boiling water and there was a look of joyful satisfaction on his face. The fire went out, the water went cold, and in the middle of the cauldron a lotus rose with the bhikshu sitting on it.26 The lictors went to fetch the king, who said: I formerly made such an agreement that now I dare not go to the place. They told him this was not a small matter and that his former agreement should be altered. He followed them in, the bhikshu preached to him, and he believed and was made free — then demolished the hell and repented of everything he had done.
The rule with no exception lasted exactly until the king wanted an exception. His own officers argued him out of it in two sentences. What is worth having, from that point, is a tree: he constantly went to a patra tree and repented under it with self-reproach, accepting the eight rules of abstinence.
The queen asked where he kept going. The ministers told her, and she waited for a time when he was not there and sent men to cut the tree down.27 When the king came and saw what had been done he swooned with sorrow and fell to the ground, and his ministers sprinkled water on his face, and after a considerable time he revived.
Then he built all round the stump with bricks and poured a hundred pitchers of cows' milk on the roots. He lay down with his four limbs spread out on the ground and took an oath: if the tree do not live, I will never rise from this. When he had said it the tree immediately began to grow from the roots. It has continued to grow till now, when it is nearly a hundred cubits high.27
The shape of time in this chapter runs from a handful of dirt to a hundred-cubit tree, through a hell and a queen's jealousy, and every stage of it turns on somebody making a binding statement and then being held to it or not.
Read: lines 1434–1444.
A man went down into a mountain through a cleft that would no longer admit a body. Mahakasyapa is inside Gurupada even now: he made a cleft and went down into it, though the place where he entered would not now let a man through. Having gone down very far, there was a hole on one side, and there the complete body of Kasyapa still abides.28
What is real, in that description, is a door that has closed behind somebody who is still in there. Chapter XXI reported the whole body of Kasyapa Tathagata under a great tope. Here the whole body is in a hole in a hill and the entrance has narrowed, and both are given as present-tense facts.
What is worth having is the dirt outside the entrance. It is the earth with which he washed his hands — and if the people living thereabouts have a sore on their heads, they plaster some of it on and feel immediately easier.29 A national relic and a local remedy, in consecutive clauses, and the remedy is the one with a use.
How you know, on that mountain, is by staying the night with a strong enough heart. Arhats abide there now as of old. Devotees of the Law from the various countries in that quarter go year by year to present offerings to Kasyapa:
And to those whose hearts are strong in faith there come Arhats at night, and talk with them, discussing and explaining their doubts, and disappearing suddenly afterwards.29
The visit is annual, the arhats come only at night, they come only to some people, and what they do is answer questions. Then they vanish. It is the one place in the book where the dead are available for consultation, and the terms are unambiguous about who gets the appointment.
How people should relate, what a person is, what makes things happen and the shape of time are not in the range read (lines 1464–1468), beyond the yearly cycle of offerings. The chapter closes on the practical warning it shares with Kapilavastu: on this hill hazels grow luxuriantly, and there are many lions, tigers and wolves, so that people should not travel incautiously.30
Read: lines 1464–1468.
Five men agree in advance not to talk to him. Buddha wished to convert Kaundinya and his four companions, and they, aware of his intention, settled on a policy:
This Sramana Gotama for six years continued in the practice of painful austerities, eating daily only a single hemp-seed, and one grain of rice, without attaining to the Path of Wisdom; how much less will he do so now that he has entered again among men, and is giving the reins to the indulgence of his body, his speech, and his thoughts! What has he to do with the Path of Wisdom? To-day, when he comes to us, let us be on our guard not to speak with him.31
They then all rose up and respectfully saluted him when he came, and there is a tope at the place where they did it. Fa-hien records the agreement and the collapse of the agreement, and gives the site of each. What a person is, in that account, is somebody whose stated resolve does not survive the other man walking in.
Their reasoning is worth having intact, because it is the ordinary reasoning of the ascetic world he had just left. Six years of extreme austerity produced nothing; going back to eating is therefore a retreat; a man who has given up the hard method has given up. It is a coherent position, held by five serious men, and the whole of what happens next is that they stand up.
What is real, in that park, is a place named after an animal's habit. A Pratyeka Buddha had lived there and the deer were regularly in the habit of stopping with him for the night. When the devas sang in the sky that the son of king Suddhodana would become Buddha in seven days, the Pratyeka Buddha heard them and immediately attained nirvana — and hence the place was named the Park of the rishi's Deer-wild.32
He got out of the way. What makes things happen there is an announcement, overheard by somebody it was not addressed to, who draws the correct conclusion about his own position and leaves before the new man arrives.
The shape of time is measured in paces from the spot where the wheel first turned. Sixty paces north from where the five saluted him, he sat facing east and first turned the wheel of the Law. Twenty paces further north he delivered his prophecy about Maitreya. Fifty paces to the south the dragon Elapattra asked him: when shall I get free from this naga body?33 Topes at all of them, all still existing.
That question from the dragon is the only thing anybody asks in the chapter, and it is a request for a date. How people should relate and what is worth having are not in the range read (lines 1490–1494), beyond the two monasteries in the park with monks residing in both.
Read: lines 1490–1498.
A monastery cut into a hill in five storeys, each shaped like a different animal. The lowest has the form of an elephant with five hundred apartments in the rock, the second a lion with four hundred, the third a horse with three hundred, the fourth an ox with two hundred, the fifth a pigeon with a hundred. At the very top there is a spring, and its water runs in front of the apartments, circling and curving down through the rooms, following the shape of the structure until it reaches the lowest storey and flows out at the door.34
What is real, in that building, is plumbing. Every room in fifteen hundred has running water arriving by gravity from the summit, and the rock has been pierced to make windows so that all of them are bright, with no room left in darkness. Steps have been hewn at the four corners of each tier to get to the top.
The shape of time is a complaint about the present. The men of the present day are of small size, so they go up step by step and manage to reach the top. But in a former age, they did so at one step.35 The stairs exist because people got shorter, or weaker. The monastery is named Paravata, the pigeon, after its topmost storey.
How people should relate, out there, is the chapter's oddest exchange. The country about is uncultivated hillocks without inhabitants, and the villages are a very long way from the hill. Their people all have bad and erroneous views. They do not know the shamans of the Law of Buddha, or Brahmans, or devotees of any of the other schools.36 They are outside every system Fa-hien has a name for.
But they are constantly seeing men on the wing coming and entering this monastery. When devotees from various countries came to worship at it, the villagers asked them: why do you not fly? The devotees whom we have seen hereabouts all fly. And the strangers answered, on the spur of the moment: our wings are not yet fully formed.36
The pilgrims made a joke to get out of it, and the villagers had the better information. How you know, in this chapter, is a real problem for Fa-hien and he says so. The kingdom of Dakshina is out of the way and perilous to traverse, with difficulties on the roads. Those who know how to manage such difficulties should bring money and various articles and give them to the king, who will then send men to escort them, and these will pass them on at stages to others who show them the shortest routes.37
Then comes the line that makes this chapter different from every other one in the book. Fa-hien, however, was after all unable to go there; but having received the above accounts from men of the country, he has narrated them.37 He has just given several paragraphs of architectural detail about a place he never saw. He marks it once, plainly, at the end, and does not withdraw any of it.
What a person is, what makes things happen and what is worth having are not in the range read (lines 1538–1544) beyond the arhats always residing there and the escort system that would have got him in.
Read: lines 1538–1544.
He came for a book and there were no books. Fa-hien's original object had been to search for copies of the Vinaya, and in the various kingdoms of North India he had found one master transmitting the rules orally to another, but no written copies he could transcribe.38 That is why he had gone on to Central India, and it is the reason the second half of the journey happened at all.
How you know, across the whole northern route, was a man's memory and another man's ear. He walked through kingdom after kingdom of four thousand monks apiece, all of them keeping the rules he came for, and none of them holding a copy. In Patna, in the mahayana monastery, he found one: the Mahasanghika rules, those observed in the first Great Council while Buddha was still in the world, the original of which was handed down in the Jetavana vihara.39
What the other schools have is described exactly and without heat. As to the other eighteen schools, each one has the views and decisions of its own masters. Those agree with this in the general meaning, but they have small and trivial differences, as when one opens and another shuts. This copy, however, is the most complete, with the fullest explanations.39
Eighteen versions, agreeing on the sense and differing on the operations, and he takes the fullest one. That is a scholar's judgement, made by a man qualified to make it, and it is the whole answer to the question he set out with in chapter I.
He then got a transcript of the sarvastivadah rules in six or seven thousand verses. Those are the ones observed by the communities of monks in the land of Ts'in — which also have all been handed down orally from master to master without being committed to writing.40 His own tradition's rules were being kept at home by memory. The text of them existed four thousand miles away, and nobody at home had ever seen it.
The shape of time is three years at a desk. He stayed there learning Sanskrit books and the Sanskrit speech, and writing out the Vinaya rules. He also picked up an Abhidharma treatise of six or seven thousand verses, a Sutra of twenty-five hundred, a chapter of the Parinirvana-vaipulya Sutra of about five thousand, and the Mahasanghikah Abhidharma.41
Then the party ends. Tao-ching arrived in the Central Kingdom and saw the rules the shamans observed there, and the dignified demeanour in their societies under all occurring circumstances. He sadly called to mind what a mutilated and imperfect condition the same rules were in at home. Then he made an aspiration: from this time forth till I come to the state of Buddha, let me not be born in a frontier land.42
He remained in India and did not return. What is worth having, for Tao-ching, is to be born somewhere else next time. He says so in the form of a vow about all his future lives. The two men saw the same monasteries and drew opposite conclusions from them. One decided this is where a person should be; the other, that this is what has to be carried home.
What a person is, for Fa-hien, is settled in the next clause. Fa-hien, however, whose original purpose had been to secure the introduction of the complete Vinaya rules into the land of Han, returned there alone.42 The word is the same one he used after Hwuy-king died on the mountain, and this time nobody has died. His last companion has simply decided that the frontier is not worth going back to.
What is real, how people should relate, and what makes things happen are not in the range read (lines 1556–1564) beyond the transmission itself, which is the chapter's whole subject.
Read: lines 1556–1564.
Two more years at a desk, and then a boat. At Tamalipti, a seaport with twenty-two monasteries, Fa-hien stayed two years writing out his Sutras and drawing pictures of images.43 The drawing is new. He has spent seventeen chapters describing things nobody at home has seen, and here he starts producing copies to carry.
Then he embarked in a large merchant vessel and went floating over the sea to the south-west. It was the beginning of winter, and the wind was favourable; and, after fourteen days, sailing day and night, they came to the country of Singhala.44 The people said it was about seven hundred yojanas from Tamalipti.
How you know a distance at sea is by asking when you arrive. He gives the number of days he sailed and then the local figure for the distance, and does not reconcile them. The same method as the whole overland journey, where his own count of days runs alongside whatever the people of each country tell him.
What is real, in the kingdom, is an island with a hundred smaller ones round it, ten or twenty or even two hundred li apart, all subject to the large one, and most of them producing pearls and precious stones.45 One island of about ten li square produces the pure and brilliant pearl.
How people should relate is set out as a tax rate. The king employs men to watch and protect it, and requires three out of every ten such pearls, which the collectors find.45 Thirty per cent, on a pearl fishery, with a guard force paid for out of it. It is the only rate of tax Fa-hien records anywhere in the book except the grain from the royal land in chapter XVI.
What a person is, what makes things happen, what is worth having and the shape of time are not in the range read (lines 1596–1602), beyond the two years of copying and the fourteen days of favourable wind.
Read: lines 1596–1602.
The island began with a shop nobody staffed. It originally had no human inhabitants but was occupied only by spirits and nagas, with which merchants of various countries carried on a trade. When the trafficking took place, the spirits did not show themselves. They simply set forth their precious commodities, with labels of the price attached to them, while the merchants made their purchases according to the price and took the things away.46
How people should relate, at the founding of this country, is a transaction with nobody present and a fixed price on the label. Neither side sees the other and neither side haggles. Then, through the coming and going of the merchants, the people of their various countries heard how pleasant the land was and flocked to it until it became a great nation.
The shape of time there is that there isn't much of one. The climate is temperate and attractive, without any difference of summer and winter, and the vegetation is always luxuriant. Cultivation proceeds whenever men think fit: there are no fixed seasons for it.47 Every other country in this book has been organised around the summer retreat and the ripening of a crop. This one has no agricultural calendar at all.
What is worth having is stated in silver and monks. Over the footprint north of the royal city the king built a tope four hundred cubits high, and beside it the Abhayagiri monastery, where there are now five thousand monks. Its hall of Buddha holds an image in green jade more than twenty cubits high, glittering all over, with a priceless pearl in the palm of its right hand.48 In the city there are sixty thousand monks getting their food from common stores. The king prepares a further supply for five or six thousand more, who come with their great bowls and take as much as the vessels will hold.
Then, standing in front of that jade image, the book breaks:
Several years had now elapsed since Fa-hien left the land of Han; the men with whom he had been in intercourse had all been of regions strange to him; his eyes had not rested on an old and familiar hill or river, plant or tree; his fellow-travellers, moreover, had been separated from him, some by death, and others flowing off in different directions; no face or shadow was now with him but his own, and a constant sadness was in his heart.49
Then he saw a merchant present, as his offering, a fan of white silk — and the tears of sorrow involuntarily filled his eyes and fell down.49 Not the jade image, not the pearl, not the five thousand monks. A trade good from home, in a stranger's hand, in a temple on an island.
What makes things happen, in this kingdom's constitution, is a king who caught himself. One of them once entered a monastic treasury and looked round at the priceless pearls. His covetous greed was excited and he wished to take them by force. In three days, however, he came to himself. He went and bowed his head to the ground in the midst of the monks to show his repentance of the evil thought, told them what had been in his mind, and asked for a rule:
That from that day forth the king should not be allowed to enter the treasury and see what it contained, and that no bhikshu should enter it till after he had been in orders for a period of full forty years.50
He legislated against his own future self, and against every future king, and set a forty-year qualification for anybody else who goes in. That is the same instinct as Asoka's even if I should enter, punish me in chapter XXXII. Unlike Asoka's, this one was not overturned in an afternoon. The man who made it made it a rule of the house, rather than a promise he could be argued out of.
What a person is, in the tooth procession, is a life read out as a list of amputations. Ten days beforehand the king caparisons a large elephant and mounts on it a man who can speak distinctly, dressed in royal robes, to beat a drum and proclaim:
He gave up kingdom, city, wife, and son; he plucked out his eyes and gave them to another; he cut off a piece of his own flesh to ransom the life of a dove; he cut off his head and gave it as an alms; he gave his body to feed a starving tigress; he grudged not his marrow and his brains. In many such ways as these did he undergo pain for the sake of all living.51
Every one of those is a place Fa-hien walked past on the way here — Gandhara for the eyes, Soo-ho-to for the dove, Takshasila for the head and for the tigress. The proclamation is his itinerary, read out to a crowd on an island two thousand miles further on, as a single life.
And the count is exact: since that event, for 1497 years, the light of the world has gone out, and all living beings have had long-continued sadness.51 Then the practical instruction — let all who wish to amass merit make the roads smooth and in good condition, adorn the lanes and by-ways, and provide abundant store of flowers and incense.
How you know what the Bodhisattva looked like at each stage is answered by lining the road with him. The king exhibits the five hundred different bodily forms in which he has appeared. Here as Sudana, there as Sama, now as the king of elephants, then as a stag or a horse. All of them are brightly coloured and grandly executed, looking as if they were alive.52 Then the tooth is carried down the middle of the road between them, to ninety days of continuous services at the Abhayagiri.
What is real, at the end of the chapter, is a man in a stone room with the animals. Dharma-gupta is a shaman of great virtue on the Chaitya hill, honoured and looked up to by all the kingdom. He has lived for more than forty years in an apartment of stone, constantly showing such gentleness of heart, that he has brought snakes and rats to stop together in the same room, without doing one another any harm.53
Read: lines 1620–1644.
Before you can bury a man as an arhat, somebody has to certify that he was one. When a shaman of the Maha-vihara drew near his end, the people all surmised he had attained it, and the king came to examine into the point. He assembled the monks according to rule and asked whether the bhikshu had attained to the full degree of Wisdom, and they answered in the affirmative. The king accordingly, when he died, buried him after the fashion of an Arhat, as the regular rules prescribe.54
How you know is by convening the community and putting the question. Not by a sign, not by a test, and not by the king's own judgement. He asks the assembled monks and takes their answer, and the answer determines the funeral. It is the same procedure as the Vaisali council in chapter XXV, run on a man instead of a rule.
What the funeral is, is a pile more than thirty cubits square and the same in height, with sandal and aloe and other fragrant woods near the top, and steps up all four sides. They wrapped the body round and round in clean white hair-cloth, almost like silk, and made a large carriage-frame like a funeral car but without the dragons and fishes.55
How people should relate, at the burning, is by throwing their own clothes on it. The king and the people collected in multitudes from all quarters and presented flowers and incense. The king himself presented them while they followed the car to the ground. Then the car was lifted onto the pile, oil of sweet basil was poured over it, and a light applied:
Every one, with a reverent heart, pulled off his upper garment, and threw it, with his feather-fan and umbrella, from a distance into the midst of the flames, to assist the burning.56
Fa-hien had not arrived in time to see the man alive, and only saw his burial. That is the second time in three chapters he records arriving after the thing he came for, and he states it without complaint both times.
What makes a grant permanent gets demonstrated in the next paragraph, and it is chapter XVI's metal plates again. The king wanted to build a new vihara, so he convoked a great assembly, gave the monks a meal of rice and presented his offerings, then selected a pair of first-rate oxen with their horns decorated in gold and silver and the precious substances. A golden plough had been provided, and the king himself turned up a furrow on the four sides of the ground within which the building was to stand.57
Then he endowed the community with the population, fields and houses, writing the grant on plates of metal, to the effect that from that time onwards, from generation to generation, no one should venture to annul or alter it. The king cuts the boundary himself with his own hands, in front of everybody, and then the boundary goes into metal so that his successors cannot move it.
What is worth having, and this is the strangest thing in the chapter, is a doctrine its own author disowns. Fa-hien heard an Indian devotee reciting from a pulpit a long account of where the alms-bowl will go next. Vaisali, then Gandhara, then Western Tukhara, Khoten, Kharachar, the land of Han, Sinhala, back to Central India. Then up to the Tushita heaven, where Maitreya will sigh over it, then back down into the naga palace, then splitting into four bowls again and returning to the mountain they came from.58
The whole future of the world is hung on where that object is. When the bowl has disappeared, the Law of Buddha will go on gradually to be extinguished. After that the life of man shortens to five years. Rice and butter and oil vanish, men become exceedingly wicked, and the grass and trees they lay hold of turn into swords and clubs. Those on whom there is blessing withdraw among the hills. Then the recovery runs the same machinery backwards: men unite in the practice of what is good, cherishing a gentle and sympathising heart, and life will go on to double its length till it reaches 80,000 years.59
Fa-hien wished to write it down as a portion of doctrine, and the man said: this is taken from no Sutra, it is only the utterance of my own mind.60
That refusal is the sharpest thing in the last quarter of the book. A man who has spent fifteen years distinguishing what is written from what is remembered asks to record a sermon, and the preacher tells him it does not qualify. He wrote it down anyway, and labelled it.
Read: lines 1704–1720.
They cut the rope. Fa-hien took passage in a large merchantman with more than two hundred men aboard, towing a smaller vessel on a rope as a provision against damage to the large one. Three days out they met a great wind, the vessel sprang a leak, and the water came in. The merchants wanted to get into the small boat, but the men on board it, fearing that too many would come, cut the connecting rope.61
What a person is, at the moment the rope is cut, is a number that will not fit. Fa-hien records it in one clause and does not comment. The merchants, greatly alarmed and feeling their risk of instant death, threw their bulky goods into the water, and he threw in his pitcher and washing-basin and some other articles.
What is worth having is what he did not throw. Fearing the merchants would cast overboard his books and images, he could only think with all his heart of Kwan-she-yin and commit his life to the church of the land of Han: I have travelled far in search of our Law. Let me, by your dread and supernatural power, return from my wanderings, and reach my resting-place.62 The prayer is addressed jointly to a bodhisattva and to the monks at home, and its content is the manuscripts.
How you know where you are, on that ocean, is by looking up. The great ocean spreads out, a boundless expanse; there is no knowing east or west, and only by observing the sun, moon and stars was it possible to go forward. If the weather were dark and rainy the ship went as she was carried by the wind, without any definite course. In the darkness of the night only the great waves were to be seen, breaking on one another and emitting a brightness like that of fire, with huge turtles and other monsters of the deep all about.63
The sea was deep and bottomless and there was nowhere to drop anchor and stop. When the sky became clear they could tell east and west, and the ship again went forward in the right direction. If she had come on any hidden rock, there would have been no way of escape.
What makes things happen, on the second voyage, is a theory about Fa-hien. After a black wind and tempestuous rain the Brahmans deliberated together and said: it is having this Sramana on board which has occasioned our misfortune and brought us this great and bitter suffering. Let us land the bhikshu and place him on some island-shore. We must not for the sake of one man allow ourselves to be exposed to such imminent peril.64
That is the same arithmetic Hwuy-king used on the mountain in chapter XIV — one man against the rest — turned around and pointed at him. How people should relate is settled by a patron who threatens them:
If you land the bhikshu, you must at the same time land me; and if you do not, then you must kill me. If you land this Sramana, when I get to the land of Han, I will go to the king, and inform against you. The king also reveres and believes the Law of Buddha, and honours the bhikshus.64
He does not argue that the storm has another cause. He tells them what will happen to them at the other end, and the merchants were perplexed and did not dare to land him. Protection here is jurisdictional: the reach of a Chinese king who honours monks extends onto a leaking ship in the South China Sea.
The shape of time on that passage is provisions divided by men. More than seventy days out from Java, with the provisions and water nearly exhausted, they used the salt water of the sea for cooking and carefully divided the fresh, each man getting two pints.65 Then the merchants took counsel: at the ordinary rate of sailing they ought to have reached Kwang-chow, and the time was passed by many days — must they not have held a wrong course? So they turned north-west looking for land, and after twelve days and nights reached the shore south of mount Lao.
How you know you are home is by the vegetables. They got good water and vegetables, and seeing those well-known vegetables, the lei and kwoh, they knew indeed that it was the land of Han.66 Not by a landmark, a coastline, or a star. He has crossed thirty countries and the thing that identifies his own is two plants he recognises.
What is real, in the last exchange of the journey, is a joke the text does not flag as one. Seeing no inhabitants and not knowing where they were, they sent a small boat into a creek and brought back two hunters, and called on Fa-hien to act as interpreter. He first spoke assuringly to them, and then slowly and distinctly asked: who are you? They replied: we are disciples of Buddha.67
The first men he meets on Chinese soil, after fifteen years, are hunters — and they answer a monk's question by naming themselves as his co-religionists. He asks what country this is and they tell him: the border of the prefecture of Ch'ang-kwang, part of Ts'ing-chow under the ruling House of Tsin.
What is worth having, in the accounting he gives at the end, is a sum in years. Six years from Ch'ang-gan to Central India. Six more of stoppages there. Three on the return to Ts'ing-chow. The countries he passed through were a few under thirty.68 From the sandy desert westwards on to India, the beauty of the monkhood's demeanour and of the transforming influence of the Law was beyond the power of language to describe. And reflecting how our masters had not heard any complete account of them, he therefore went on without regarding his own poor life.
He then explains himself to the man who wrote it down:
When I look back on what I have gone through, my heart is involuntarily moved, and the perspiration flows forth. That I encountered danger and trod the most perilous places, without thinking of or sparing myself, was because I had a definite aim, and thought of nothing but to do my best in my simplicity and straightforwardness. Thus it was that I exposed my life where death seemed inevitable, if I might accomplish but a ten-thousandth part of what I hoped.69
Read: lines 1750–1776.
Everything above is sourced to the chapters named. Everything below is built rather than found, and is not measured by assessgate.sh.
[SPECULATIVE]A rule you write yourself into will be argued away by your own staff. Asoka told the master of his hell to punish him as a sinner if he ever walked in, and when the moment came his lictors said this is not a small matter, let your former agreement be altered, and he followed them in. The Ceylonese king in chapter XXXVIII did the same job differently: instead of binding himself, he asked the monks to make a regulation excluding the king from the treasury, and attached a forty-year qualification for anyone else. Applies when you can foresee your own future temptation and there is a body outside your control that can hold the rule. Fails where the constraint lives only in your own word, because the people who serve you are paid to find you exceptions. Decision type: power consolidation.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, priced by the source. The route into Dakshina existed and the terms were known: bring money and various articles, give them to the king, and he sends men to escort you, who pass you on at stages to others who show you the shortest ways.37 Fa-hien did not go, and he does not say why — only that he was unable to.
What that costs the book is measurable. Everything in chapter XXXV is hearsay, and he says so; and it is the only chapter where he reports something he cannot vouch for. Against that, the men on the wing were not going to be there when he arrived, and the villagers' answer to the pilgrims suggests the local account was already doing the thing accounts do at a distance from a famous building.
[SPECULATIVE]A live alternative, taken by the last man with him. Tao-ching stayed. His reasoning is on the page and it is not idleness: he had seen the rules kept properly and the dignified demeanour of the societies, remembered the mutilated state of the same rules at home, and vowed never again to be born in a frontier land.42
The two men had identical evidence. One concluded that the good place is where you should be, and the other that the good place is where you fetch things from. What settles it is not doctrine but what each of them thought the rules were for — Tao-ching wanted to live under them and Fa-hien wanted them written down and delivered. Nothing in the source suggests either man tried to talk the other round.
[SPECULATIVE]When eighteen versions agree on the sense and differ on the procedure, take the fullest one and say why. Fa-hien's account of the choice is four clauses long: they agree in general meaning, they differ as when one opens and another shuts, this one is the most complete, it has the fullest explanations. Applies when the variants are all in good faith and the differences are operational rather than doctrinal, so that completeness is a real criterion rather than a preference. Fails where the disagreement is about what the rule is for, in which case the fullest text is merely the most confident one. Decision type: when to compromise a core value.
[SPECULATIVE]A Stoic advisor on the leaking ship. The dichotomy of control divides what is yours from what is not: your judgement and the quality of your action are yours, and your property, your body and your reputation are not. See The Stoic Dichotomy of Control. Fa-hien throws his pitcher and washing-basin into the sea without a word, which is the doctrine performed exactly. Then he prays, and what he prays about is the books.
The counsel would be that the manuscripts are in the same category as the basin. They are property, they are on a hull with a hole in it, and no amount of correct intention keeps them dry. What Fa-hien does instead is sort his possessions into two piles and treat one of them as not-his and the other as the thing he is for. He is not failing the doctrine; he is refusing its scope. A Stoic would say that fifteen years of work can be lost in an afternoon and the man is unharmed, and Fa-hien's whole life is the position that this is not true — that the mutilated rule-book at home is a real injury to real people, and the copy is the repair.
And a Kautilyan advisor on the patron who saved him. The Arthashastra reads protection as a function of whose reach extends to a place. See What a Mauryan Statecraft Manual Took For Granted. The patron does not defend Fa-hien's innocence of causing the storm, which would have been arguing on the Brahmans' ground and could not have been won. He extends a foreign king's jurisdiction onto the deck and offers his own body as the trigger for it. The threat is credible because everybody aboard is going to the same port.
Where the two advisors converge is on what actually kept the books dry, and it is not the prayer and not the rope. It is that one man on that ship had something to lose at the destination.