Famous Pilgrims of the Past

The four sacred places and four places of miracles are known as Atthamahathanani or the Eight Great Places. Emperor Asoka called a visit to these eight shrines “dhammayatra” (dhamma ex-pedition) or a pilgrimage of piety. On his twentieth regnal year in 249 BC, he heeded the exhortation of the Buddha and embarked on a holy pilgrimage visiting all these places. His pilgrimage was literally a “landmark” journey because wherever he went, he built stupas and raised pillars with inscriptions to commemorate his visit to these holy places. These towering monolithic pillars made of polished sandstone and topped with animal capitals have helped to identify the exact locations of the Buddhist world’s most sacred places even after they fell into ruins following the downfall of Buddhism in India. Today after 2,250 years, many of these Asokan pillars still stand proclaiming his faith and devotion. Modern day pilgrims can still see these Asokan pillars in Lumbini, Kapilavatthu and Vesali, the famous Lion Capital at Sarnath Museum and the Elephant Capital at Sankasia. Asoka’s example was emulated by succeeding Buddhist kings, queens, nobles and wealthy men and women. As a result, India became studded with Buddhist monu­ments and shrines.

From China came the devout and earnest Buddhist monks, like Fa Hsien, Hsüan Tsang and many others, who travelled great distances braving immense hardships, perils, and even death to fulfill their desire to visit the holy places. In the Kao-seng-chuan (Chinese Monks in India, by I-Ching), another pilgrim, I-Ching, described how he had to pass many days without food, even with­out a drop of water and wondered how the other travellers, under such difficult conditions, could keep up their morale and spirit.

On the long, long trek, many died from sheer physical exhaus­tion or sickness and some had to leave their bones in desert-sands or somewhere out in India. Yet, in spite of these difficulties, they never faltered nor wavered, such was their indomitable spirit and desire to gaze on the sacred vestiges of their religion. Never did men endure greater suffering by desert, mountain and sea and ex­hibit such courage, religious devotion and powers of endurance!

The pioneer among them was Fa Hsien. He took five years to walk from the Western border of China across the Takla Makan desert, one of the most hostile environments on this planet, and over the windswept passes of the Pamir and Hindu Kush mountain ranges to Northern India. After spending six years in India, he sailed to Sri Lanka, where he spent two more years. His homeward journey by sea took another year in which he stopped for five months in Java. Fa Hsien left an account of his journey of 399-414 AD in the Fo-kwo-ki (Record of the Buddhist Country). One hundred years after Fa Hsien, two monks, Sung Yun and Hui Sheng of Loyang (Honan-fu), were sent by the Empress of the Northern Wei dynasty to obtain Buddhist books from India. They started out in 518 AD and after reaching as far as Peshawar and Nagarahara (Jalalabad), returned to China in 521 AD. Sung Yun left a short narrative of his travels but Hui Sheng did not record any details of the journey.

Undoubtedly the most renowned Chinese pilgrim was the great Tipitaka master, Hsüan Tsang, who secretly set out on the long journey to the West in 629 AD at the age of twenty-seven. His travel in India was the most extensive, taking almost seventeen years (629-645 AD) and when he returned to China, he was given a great ovation and public honour by the T’ang Emperor, T’ai Tsung. Hsüan Tsang’s record of his travels, known as Si-yü-ki (Record of the Western World), is a detailed and romantic account of the Buddhist shrines in India and other countries he passed through. His devotion, piety and love for learning became a source of inspiration to his contemporaries and later generation of pilgrims including I-Ching, who took the sea route to India and back. His travels covered the period 671-695 AD in which he spent ten years studying in Nalanda and another ten years in Sri-vijaya, Sumatra translating the scriptures. He wrote his account in the Nan-hai-ki-kuei-nai-fachuan (Record of the Inner Law sent home from the South Sea).

The records of the Chinese pilgrims are the only available writ­ings describing the condition of Buddhism and the Buddhist sites as they existed at that time and have proven to be invaluable in locating their ruins during excavations in the 19th  century by Sir Alexander Cunningham and others.