Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road (review)

Sally Hovey Wriggins makes no pretense of being an academic; she does not pretend even to be a scholar. Rather, she is a writer fascinated by the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang (596-664) and his amazing journey through the desert wastes, the mysterious kingdoms, and the jagged mountains of inner Asia in pursuit of sacred texts in India. Wriggins does not tell us exactly why she is so en-tranced. She acknowledges a lifelong love of Buddhist art and a fascination with "the lands farthest out," which she attributes to her own upbringing in the American Northwest. She also refers to "many visits" to Asia, including a memorable trip to the Kabul Museum, where the curators "produced a map showing exactly where [Xuanzang] had passed through Afghanistan" (p. xvii). Whatever her reasons, however, Wriggins has been motivated to write a lively, engaging account. Her narrative, Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road, is a marvelous and richly illustrated historical travelogue that transports the reader back to a distant time when travel was an adventure into the unknown. She takes her reader on Xuanzang's journey, introducing the places he went, the things he saw—or, just as often, what he must have seen— and the people he met. In the process she brings the monk's experience to life.

Wriggins is, above all, fascinated with where the monk went and how he managed. She traces the journey from its beginning in 629 in the Tang capital of Chang'an through the wastes of the Taklamakan Desert, the driest spot on Earth, where Xuanzang first was abandoned by his guide and then, in a dreadful accident, lost all his water. She recounts with wonder how in a dream he had a vision that urged him to go forward, and how he wandered for four days with nary a drop before his horse, itself an ancient, sway-backed creature, found an oasis for him. She tells of his meetings with kings who both helped and hindered him along his route, and how he served as messenger between the king of Turfan and the khan of the Western Turks. She follows him through the caravan cities of central Asia (Samarkand, Kunduz, Balkh) and to the majestic statues of the Buddha looming above the valley of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. Finally she leads the reader through the Khyber Pass into India, land of the Buddha and the pilgrim's goal.

Xuanzang was in India for more than a decade. He visited all the major sites of Buddhist pilgrimage, traveled the length and breadth of the subcontinent, and spent time at all the major centers of Buddhist learning. During two separate stays at the famous Nalanda Monastery, the scholarly heart of medieval Indian Buddhism even as the religion was already dying out in its homeland, he was adopted as a disciple by Silabhadra, the eldest and most venerated monk who had learned of his impending visit in a dream three years before their first meeting. Wriggins recounts each step of the monk's progress through the subcontinent, trying to see the subcontinent as he saw it, attempting to recapture the wonder the pilgrim must have felt as he circled the monastery at Bodh Gaya where tradition says the Buddha received enlightenment, or climbing Vulture Peak where the Buddha is said to have preached.

In her final chapters Wriggins recounts Xuanzang's triumphal return to China. The journey home was almost as eventful as the outgoing trip had been, but in 645, bearing hundreds of new treatises as well as a trove of valuable relics and images, he reached China. He had crossed some of the highest mountain passes in the world, had lost the treasured white elephant given to him by the great King Harsha, had escaped robbers...