A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms: Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hsien of Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline
1877
Translated by James Legge
In the year 399 AD, a Chinese monk named Faxian abandoned the comforts of his monastery and set out on an audacious fifteen-year pilgrimage across Central Asia to India and Sri Lanka. His singular mission: to locate complete copies of the Buddhist Vinaya, the sacred Books of Discipline that governed monastic life, texts that had become corrupted or lost in China. What he found instead was a civilization. Faxian's account stands as one of the oldest and most remarkable travel narratives in world literature. Traversing the Gobi Desert, scaling the deadly passes of the Hindu Kush, and sailing the pirate-infested waters to Sri Lanka, he documents with clear-eyed precision the Buddhist kingdoms of ancient India: their grand stupas, their tens of thousands of monks, their kings who protected the Dharma. His observations remain invaluable, offering a rare firsthand account of a civilization at its height, decades before the Gupta empire's decline. This is travel writing as spiritual quest, history as lived experience. For anyone drawn to the early spread of Buddhism, to ancient world geography, or to the extraordinary lengths humans will go in pursuit of sacred knowledge.
