Overview

When he was 65 years old, the monk Fa-hsien resolved to travel from northern China to India, homeland of the Buddhist faith. The result was a journey of some 10,000 miles, or 16,000 kilometers, across China, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Malay Archipelago. The expedition, details of which Fa-hsien later recorded, constituted one of China's first notable encounters with India. In accomplishing his mission of retrieving original Buddhist texts, Fa-hsien influenced widespread acceptance of the new faith in his homeland.

Background

The most ancient of Chinese faiths are various folk religions and forms of ancestor-worship, many of them still practiced today. The sixth century B.C., however, saw the birth of new belief systems based on the teachings of three remarkable contemporaries: Siddhartha Gautama...