The Journeys of Xuanzang, part two: Onward and Upward

In part one of the journey, Xuan-zang braved the Gobi desert and contended with the overbearing monarch of Turpan, but also beheld many wonderful sites at that venerable city before moving on to Yanqi. After leaving Yanqi, Xuan-zang moved onto the city of Kucha, also called Kuchar in Uyghur (كۇچار) or Kùchē (庫車) in Chinese.

The Buddhist Kingdom of Kucha

Out of all the cities of the northern Silk Road surrounding the Tarim Basin, Kucha was the largest and most prosperous. As a powerful Buddhist kingdom, Kucha dominated the Silk Road trade in the area since at least the 4th century. Xuan-zang’s description of the city was as follows:

The soil is suitable for rice and grain…it produces grapes, pomegranates and numerous species of plums, pears, peaches, and almonds…The ground is rich in minerals-gold, copper, iron, and lead and tin. The air is soft, and the manners of the people honest. The style of writing is Indian, with some differences. They excel other countries in their skill in playing on the lute and pipe. They clothe themselves with ornamental garments of silk and embroidery….

There are about one hundred convents in this country, with five thousand and more disciples. These belong to the Little Vehicle [Hinayana]¹ of the school of the Sarvastivadas. Their doctrine and their rules of discipline are like those of India, and those who read them use the same originals….About 40 li to the north of this desert city there are two convents close together on the slope of a mountain…Outside the western gate of the chief city, on the right and left side of the road, there are erect figures of Buddha, about 90 feet high.

Source Wikipedia (original source unclear)

As with prior cities, Xuan-zang’s reputation had proceeded him, and he was greeted by the local ruler, which described as having “red hair and blue eyes”. The king of Kucha at the time was likely either ethnically Sogdian or Tokharian. We saw similar figures depicted in Buddhist art when we looked at the Bezeklik Caves in episode one. The Silk Road north of the Tarim Basin was a fascinating mix of different peoples and ethnicities and it could change from city to city. The Tokharians were distant relatives of other Indo-European people, and their language had some common elements to European languages such as English. Yet, the link between the Tokharians and Westerners is frankly pretty tenuous, but that did not stop researchers in the 19th century who had certain … racial theories, from hyping up their contribution to the Silk Road. It’s important to be cautious and not to draw too many conclusions. Hidden agendas make for bad research.

What’s more interesting to me is how the Tokharians lived alongside totally disparate groups such as Chinese, Turks, Uyghurs, Sogdians and so on, and at times they had friednly co-existence (the Tokharians evidentially revered the Sogdians in particular and tried to emulate them), and at other times they clashed. In other words, pretty typical human stuff. This intermix of cultures and people is what makes the Silk Road so fascinating.

But I digress…

Kucha had a lively material culture, thanks to runoff from the Tian Shan mountains providing plenty of water, and thus a wealth of food and agriculture grew here. It’s place on the Silk Road also ensured plenty of goods and materials were traded here too. Further, Kucha was famed for its music, and musicians from Kucha were highly sought after. A Kuchean orchestra was staffed at the court of Great Tang throughout the dynasty, and played for official ceremonies and celebrations. My book on Xuan-zang points out that famous songs they played included titles like “The Jade Woman Hands the Cup Around”, “Meeting on the Seventh Evening”, and “The Game of Hide the Buckle”.

Yet, for the Buddhist tradition as we now practice it today, Kucha was even more important for another reason: it was the hometown of Kumārajīva (344–413 CE) the translator.

Kumarajiva the Great Translator

Kumarajiva was the son of an Kashimiri-Indian father and a Kuchean mother, and was raised in Kucha. He studied Sarvastivadan-branch Buddhism, an influential pre-Mahayana Buddhist school whose monastic code was adopted by Mahayana Buddhist communities in China onward. However, at some point Kumarajiva converted to Mahayana Buddhism and by age 20 ordained as a Buddhist monk. His fame as a scholar reached China at the time, and he was sought out by the emperor. Our homeboy, Kumarajiva, was imprisoned at one point by a local warlord, but eventually was released by the Chinese emperor, and brought to the capitol of Chang-an (see prologue episode), and was feted.

Kumarajiva proved to be an excellent translator, and helped bring many Indian-Buddhists texts to mainsteam China. Because the Sanskrit originals were mostly lost in India, but preserved in Classical Chinese, these works, now core texts in many modern Buddhist traditions, help maintain the tradition today. To name a few that you probably already familiar with, Kumarajiva translated these sutras:³

• The Lotus Sutra
• The Amitabha Sutra (part of the 3 Pure Land Sutras)
• The Diamond Sutra, important in the Zen tradition
• The Shurangama Sutra, important in Chinese Buddhism, especially Zen
• The Sutra of the Ten Stages (chapter 26 of the Flower Garland Sutra)²
• …. among many others.

To reiterate this point: the English translations of these texts we use today come from the Classical Chinese editions that were originally translated from Sanskrit and prakrits by Kumarajiva.

Having said all that, let’s return, centuries later to Xuan-zang…

Staying at Kucha

From Kucha, Xuan-zang would have to pass through Aksu before crossing over the Tian Shan mountains, but heavy snows in the passes mean that Xuan-zang had to stay in Kucha for two months. During this time Xuan-zang stayed out of trouble, and spent many days discussing Buddhist philosophy with the local community. This included the famous Kizil Caves:

The Kizil Caves (in Uyghur قىزىل مىڭ ئۆي) or Kèzī’ěr Qiānfú Dòng (克孜尔千佛洞, lit “1000 Buddhist Caves of Kizil”) are a massive cave complex and probably one of the earliest along the northern Silk Road used for Buddhist monasticism. The artwork here often shows strong influence from Buddhist-India, or more precisely, the Greco-Bactrian art of Gandhara. However, like the Bezeklik Caves we saw earlier, a combination of local religious iconoclasm, looting by European researchers,⁴ and subsequent tourism have greatly disturbed the artwork in the Kizil Caves. Here’s an example reconstruction from the so-called Peacock Room:

In any case, check out the Wikipedia article I linked above on the Kizil Caves. There’s simply too much to add here, but needless to say, Xuan-zang must’ve beheld some amazing art in his time, which we will sadly never see again.

Side note: the red haired, blue-eye ruler of Kucha that I mentioned earlier ran afoul of the Chinese emperor, Taizong, a few years later by pretending fealty, while also declaring his loyalty to the Western Turkic Khaganate (more on that soon). Needless to say, China did not take this lying down and soon conquered Kucha just as it did with Turpan. Xuan-zang would be long gone by this point though.

The Tian Shan Mountains

Once it was safer to travel, Xuan-zang’s caravan moved onto the city of Aksu, which in his time was called Baluka (跋祿迦, Bolujia in Chinese). Xuan-zang’s caravan was again ambushed by bandits along the way, but once again the bandits were full from another attack and quickly lost interest in Xuan-zang’s group. I’d say Xuan-zang was lucky, or the bandits were just lazy. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Anyhow, Xuan-zang stated that Aksu was very similar to Kucha in many respects, though according to Wikipedia, Xuan-zang noticed that the people of Aksu seemed to speak a different kind of Tokharian language. The Wikipedia article on Tokharian mentions that there were several dialects, all of them pretty different from one another. In any case, it doesn’t seem that Xuan-zang stayed at Aksu too long though and set out for the mountain passes over the Tian Shan mountains to reach Tokmok. There things took a dangerous turn.

The Tian Shan mountains are huge, cold and dangerous to traverse. The Khan Tengri mountain is more than 23,000 feet high, and the Bedel Pass near it is one of the few ways to cross over to the other side. Of the mountain, Xuan-zang wrote:

This mountain is steep and dangerous, and reaches to the clouds (lit. “heaven”). From creation the perpetual snow which has collected here in piles, as been changed into glaciers which melt neither in the winter nor summer; the hard-frozen and cold sheets of water rise mingling with the cloudes; looking at them the eye is blinded with the glare, so that it cannot long gaze at them. The icy peaks fall down sometimes and lie athwart the road, some of them a hundred feet high, and others several tens of feet wide.

The Silk Road Journey with Xuan-zang, page 31

It took eight days to traverse the pass, and Xuan-zang lost up to 30-40% of his men and countless horses and oxen. Imagine that famous scene from the movie Fellowship of the Ring when the good guys braved the mountain pass, but instead of turning back almost half the party freezes to death. That’s how serious it was.

Nonetheless, the survivors did reach the gorgeous lake of Issyk Kul, now in modern Kyrgyzstan. From here, the caravan would soon reach Tokmok and with it enter the lands of the powerful Western Turkic Khaganate….

Stay tuned!

¹ Explained also in part one, the term Hinayana Buddhism is not related to Theravada Buddhism (it’s seems unlikely to me that they interacted with one another due to geography), but instead is a broad term for all pre-Mayahana Indian Buddhism. It’s still a somewhat pejorative term, but the relationship between early Hinayana Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism is … complicated and not necessarily antagonistic.

² I would love to talk about the Flower Garland Sutra some time, but it is a TOME, and I’ve only read very small parts of it. The Sutra of the Ten Stages deserves special attention though, and I have read it, but it’s challenge all by itself to explain in a blog post. Maybe some day.

³ one notable omission in this list is the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra is thought to have been compiled in China, not India, as a clever summary of much longer sutras. It gets to the “heart” of the matter, if you take my meaning. Xuan-zang, as we’ll see later, brings it back to India where it’s translated to Sanskrit, not from it.

⁴ The story of Albert Grünwedel is an interesting example of someone who was a dedicated archeologist, but also kind of unhinged too.