Closing pass across all forty chapter runs of Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, in James Legge's translation. Read from
RAW/books/A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.md, chapters I–XL. Written last, out of the finished runs.Siblings: Part 1 — Chapters I–XIII · Part 2 — Chapters XIV–XXVI · Part 3 — Chapters XXVII–XL. No sibling thread map exists for this source yet.
⚠ Supersedes the original whole-book report, which merged the whole journey into one account.
Source ingest: Fa-hien, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms
The whole book is one man checking whether a rule-book is intact, and it never once loses that thread. He set out because the Books of Discipline at home were mutilated and imperfect, and in chapter XXXVI, thirty-five chapters later, he finds a complete copy and takes three years to write it out. Everything between those two points is a survey of communities keeping the rules he came to verify. When he reaches the council of Vaisali in chapter XXV — seven hundred monks re-examining and collating the disciplinary books after a dispute over ten points — he is standing in front of an earlier version of his own errand.
The single most repeated fact in the book is that the transmission held. Kings from the Sandy Desert to Ceylon have been firm believers. The forms of ceremony and rules practised by the communities have been handed down from one generation to another without interruption. The places of the four great topes have been fixed and handed down without break. The laws regulating a monk's demeanour in sitting and rising are the ones practised by all the saints since Buddha was in the world. He says some version of that in five separate chapters, and it is what a man who came to check an inventory would say.
Strangers are provided for in advance, everywhere, by rule rather than by kindness. Khoten keeps rooms for monks from all quarters who have not arrived yet. Woo-chang supplies stranger bhikshus for three days and then tells them to find their own bed. Mathura's residents carry a newcomer's clothes and bowl, wash his feet, anoint him with oil, feed him outside the regular hours, and only then ask how many years he has been a monk, which is what decides where he sleeps. Even the ninety-six rival systems of chapter XX run free houses on the empty roads for travellers and monks alike, and the only difference Fa-hien records is the length of stay. That infrastructure is why the journey is possible, and he almost never comments on it.
Where the system breaks, it breaks on hospitality rather than on terrain. The party splits three times. At Woo-e, three men turn back because the local people neglected the duties of propriety and righteousness and treated them meanly. At the alms-bowl in Purushapura, three more go home and one dies. On the Little Snowy mountains a man freezes and orders the others to leave him. Nobody in this book is stopped by a mountain; they are stopped by cold, by illness, and by a town that would not feed them.
Objects decide who may have them, and kings accept the verdict. The Yueh-she king had won his war and could not move the alms-bowl with eight elephants, so he read the kneeling as a ruling on his own merit, was ashamed, and built a monastery instead. Asoka meant to demolish the Rama tope and a dragon opened its accounts and invited him to beat them, and he did his own valuation and went home. Buddha's pewter staff cannot be lifted by a hundred or a thousand men. Three times a sufficient force stops on a non-military ground, and each time the man stopping is the strongest party present.
Rules that bind a ruler come in two versions and only one of them holds. Asoka told the master of his hell to punish him as a sinner if he ever entered, and his own lictors talked him through the gate in two sentences. The Ceylonese king who caught himself coveting the treasury asked the monks to make it a regulation, with a forty-year qualification for anyone else, and it stayed. The difference is whether the constraint lives in your own word or in a body outside your control.
Two systems for making a grant outlast the man who made it, and both are metal. In Mathura the endowments — fields, houses, gardens, orchards, the resident populations and their cattle — are engraved on plates and handed from king to king, without any daring to annul them. In Ceylon, six chapters from the end, the king ploughs the boundary himself with a golden plough behind decorated oxen and then writes the grant on plates of metal, so that from generation to generation nobody may annul or alter it. The same instrument at the two far ends of the journey, arrived at independently.
A place becomes a place because somebody came back and identified it. Buddha tells his disciples that this is where he ransomed the dove; the people of the country become aware of the fact and rear a tope. He tells them this is where, in a former age, he laid down his bow and weapons; men subsequently get to know it and build. That is the mechanism behind most of the several hundred sites in this book, and the ground itself remembers nothing without the return visit.
The one thing that cannot be reproduced is a likeness. An artificer went up to the Tushita heaven three times to get Maitreya's height and complexion right, and came back with an eighty-cubit image everybody can see. Prasenajit had the first sandalwood image carved and Buddha told it to return to its seat and serve as a pattern to the four classes of disciples. But kings from every region sent skilful artists to copy the shadow at Nagara, and none of them could, and the shadow grows fainter the closer you walk. The tradition can copy a body, a posture and a scale, and it cannot copy a shadow.
Fa-hien reports almost nothing about what makes things happen at the level of an explanation. The desert has demons and hot winds in the same clause. Dragons on the Onion range spit poisonous winds when provoked, and the local people call the range the Snow mountains, and both statements stand. A dragon at Sankasya holds the office of danapati and causes abundant harvests and rains in season. A robe brought out in a drought produces immediate rain. None of these is defended, connected, or ranked against the others. He is a surveyor rather than a theologian, and the book has no theory of causes at all.
Doctrine appears three times in forty chapters and it is the same doctrine each time. The bitterness and vanity of life as impermanent and uncertain, and the body as a bubble or foam on the water. That is the whole of what he reports anybody teaching. It reappears in the mouth of the bhikshu on the black rock before he cuts his throat, and again in the mind of the bhikshu in Asoka's hell, and once, at Jetavana, in Fa-hien's own account of his dead friends. He never explains it and never argues for it.
What a woman's life is like in these kingdoms is not in the range read (lines 228–1777). Nuns appear twice — Utpala, who is changed into a king so she can be first in the queue, and the bhikshunis who offer at Ananda's tope because he asked that women be allowed to leave their families. Ambapali gives a vihara and a garden. The woman on the wall at Vaisali feeds a thousand sons. That is four appearances in forty chapters, and none of them describes a life.
Nothing in any chapter reports what ordinary lay people believe, as distinct from what they do. He counts their monks, records their diet, notes that they use cowries and keep no butchers' shops, and reports that they build charity houses and set flower stalls outside a relic shrine at dawn. Their observances are described in detail and their reasons never are.
Chapter XIII's uncopyable shadow and chapter VI's three trips to a heaven are the same problem answered opposite ways, and the book does not notice. In both, a king wants an accurate likeness of somebody not present, and both times the answer is to send a skilled craftsman to look. At Darada the method works after three attempts and produces an object that emits light on fast-days. At Nagara it fails for every artist every king sends. The difference is never named.
Chapter XVI's country with no magistrates and chapter XXVII's city built by spirits describe the same king from two angles. Asoka's Middle Kingdom has no household registration, no corporal punishment, a single tax on royal land, and people who go or stay as they please. Asoka's Patna has a palace no human hands could have built, an inscription recording that he gave away the world and bought it back three times, and a hell he commissioned with a specification. Neither passage acknowledges the other, and both are Fa-hien reporting what he was told on the ground.
Chapter XXX's suicide and chapter XXIII's demotion are the two places where a monk reasons his way past his own vows, and they land in opposite registers. The man on the black rock accepts the prohibition against killing himself and reclassifies the act as killing three poisons, and gets three ranks in one stroke. The devotee at Rama gives up the great prohibitions in order to be allowed to pull up grass, and founds a monastery whose head has been a novice ever since. Both men treat the rule as binding and find a legitimate way round it. Only one of them dies.
Reading forty chapters as forty worlds surfaces material a merged account discards because it happens once. The five hundred blind men whose staves grew into a grove. The rat carrying a lamp-wick that burned down a seven-storey vihara. The hundred topes that cannot be counted even by standing a man beside each one. Eight families with eight seals opening one door at dawn. A dragon carried down the seniority order in a copper vessel of cream, once a year. The fifteen-hundred-room monastery with a spring at the top feeding water past every door. The villagers who asked pilgrims why they were not flying. The fan of white silk in a stranger's hand that made a man cry in front of a jade Buddha. Two hunters on a Chinese beach answering a monk's first question with we are disciples of Buddha.
And one sentence that only exists because the chapter was read on its own. In chapter XXXIX an Indian preacher gives a complete future history of the world hung on the travels of an alms-bowl, and when Fa-hien asks to record it as doctrine the man says: this is taken from no Sutra, it is only the utterance of my own mind. A book about the integrity of a transmission ends four chapters later, and the sharpest thing in it is a man refusing to let his own sermon into the canon.