One of the most important and elaborate accounts of travel along the ancient Silk Route comes from the journeys of the Chinese monk Xuanzang (玄奘), who lived in the early Tang Dynasty (626–907) and is famously the inspiration for the Tang Monk, protagonist of the great classical novel Journey to the West.
Centuries later, the sheer scale and challenge of Xuanzang’s journey remained unmatched — even in the 19th century when Western explorers undertook lengthy expeditions to rediscover regions that the Chinese monk had trekked on his path to India in search of the Buddhist dharma.
Xuanzang was born in a family of Confucian scholars in what is now China’s Henan Province in 602. His quest to obtain the authentic teachings of the Buddha Shakyamuni, who had reached enlightenment and preached his dharma over a millennium prior, led him to travel between 15,500 and 16,500 miles to India and back in a voyage lasting 17 years.
He also travelled India itself extensively, visiting many sacred sites of Buddhism and meeting with believers across the subcontinent.
Entering India, he travelled across multiple kingdoms from the north extremity of Indian subcontinent to its South, west and east. During his 17 years of pilgrimage, he visited more than 100 kingdoms in today’s nine countries of South, East and Central Asia.
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Xuanzang’s entire journey through the geography of Greater India is divided into “Shadow Pilgrimage” regions and “Sacred Geography” regions by Aparajita Goswami and Deepak Anand in their book The Pilgrimage Legacy of Xuanzang. I picked up a copy a few years ago from a lone bookshop outside the gates of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, where Buddha Śākyamuni attained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree.
For Xuanzang, an unparalleled aspirant of Buddhist wisdom, Bodh Gaya which in his time was known as Mahabodhi (the larger settlement was called Urvela) would have been the ultimate pilgrimage. He left a most detailed description of the temple and its premises including a descriptive image of a gilded idol of Buddha seated in the earth-touching (bhumisparsha) posture, commemorating the moment of enlightenment and the sacred pipal tree (Ficus religiosa) under which the Buddha gained enlightenment.
According to Goswami and Anand, by the time Xuanzang reached Magadha, the ancient kingdom where Mahabodhi was located, five years had already passed since he had left Chang’an, the capital of Tang China.
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When the Chinese monk reached Urvela, a large number of monks had gathered there after the monsoons had retreated and very soon news reached about his presence in Nalanda Vihara — the greatest residential university of the ancient world as well as the leading center of Buddhist scholarship.
Xuanzang was escorted to Nalanda with great fanfare and welcomed by its chief abbot, the octogenarian Śīlabhadra, who requested King Harsha to grant Xuanzang the revenues of three nearby villages to support his stay at the university. Xuanzang leaves a detailed account of King Harsha, whom he referred to as Śīlāditya (“Sun of Virtue”). It was through this royal grant that Xuanzang was able to reside at Nalanda, study the śāstras and sutras, and prepare manuscripts to carry back to China.
‘Shadow Pilgrimage’
Before reaching Bodh Gaya or Nalanda, where he would remain for nearly five years, Xuanzang visited many other important pilgrimage centres on his journey from Central Asia to India, leaving behind one of the most detailed accounts of seventh-century geography. His descriptions proved so precise that, during the colonial period, explorers, archaeologists, and expeditionists attempted to reconstruct his world from his writings.
Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher, the French archaeologist and art historian who specialized in Buddhist iconography and first proposed that the anthropomorphic image of the Buddha was heavily influenced by Greek artistic traditions, wrote an extensive commentary on The Ancient Geography of Gandhara based on Xuanzang’s travelogue.
Goswami and Anand explain that the Shadow Pilgrimages lay along the Silk Route in regions through which Alexander had marched—areas that today fall within Afghanistan and Pakistan and once formed the midway point between China and India. These were not places through which Śākyamuni himself had travelled while preaching the Dharma, nor were they sites where his principal relics were enshrined. Rather, they emerged later under the Greco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek, and Kushan rulers, preserving objects associated with the Buddha, including clothing and personal belongings.
Xuanzang entered the Indian subcontinent through the western Silk Route and visited several pilgrimage sites on this Shadow Pilgrimage circuit, including the kingdoms of Hwo (Kunduz), Baktra (Balkh), Kie-chih (Dara-i-Suf), Bamiyan, Gandhara, Kapisa (Bagram), Lanpo (Lamghan), and Nagarahara (Jalalabad).
Today, these ancient kingdoms lie across eastern and northern Afghanistan and Pakistan. From Nagarahara, Xuanzang entered Gandhara and then Taxila, which I discussed in my previous two columns, before travelling to Kashmir. From there, he continued into Magadha and eventually Urvela.
It is important to revisit this circuit because it has effectively disappeared from the contemporary world, having been repeatedly overtaken by invasion, war, and political upheaval since the 10th century. In Xuanzang’s time, however, it was a culturally vibrant and economically prosperous region whose rulers actively patronized Buddhism.
Some reliefs and sculptures from the Buddhist sites along the Shadow Pilgrimage route survive today in the Lahore Museum and the war-ravaged National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. We also know the tragic fate of the Great Buddha statues of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. During Xuanzang’s lifetime, those monumental sculptures were still in their glory and had stood there for only a few centuries.
Equally fascinating is how this “Shadow” Buddhist geography continued to replicate itself along the greater Silk Route, while the Sacred Geography remained fixed for obvious reasons. The earliest Buddhist cave complexes at Kizil in present-day Xinjiang and the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang already formed part of this Shadow Geography during Xuanzang’s lifetime. Their relics and manuscripts are now dispersed across museums around the world.
These caves were adorned with magnificent pictorial narratives from the life of Śākyamuni as well as Buddhist manuscripts that were rediscovered during the Great Game of the 19th century by Western explorers.
The ‘Sacred Geography’
According to Goswami and Anand, the “Sacred Geography” through which Xuanzang travelled was referred to as the Buddhacarika, meaning the “sublime wanderings of the Buddha.”
Before exploring the geography of this route, it is worth looking more closely at the Sanskrit word Buddhacarika to understand its deeper metaphorical meaning. Much like in the Chinese language, where the meaning of a word depends on its constituent characters, in Sanskrit the meaning of words emerges from their root sounds. Buddhacarika (बुद्धचरिका) is derived from two roots — Buddha (बुद्ध) and Carikā (चरिका). Buddha means “to awaken” or “to become aware,” while Carikā means “to travel” or “to conduct oneself.” The feminine noun carikā can also refer to a missionary tour.
Thus, while Buddhacarika literally means “the wanderings” or “travels of the Buddha,” it can also be understood metaphorically as “the path leading to the Buddha’s enlightenment.” This interpretation is consistent with the historical narrative. From the time he left his father’s palace as a prince, throughout his years of wandering and teaching the Dharma across the Gangetic plains, Śākyamuni referred to himself as a Bodhisattva. Only after attaining enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree did he refer to himself as the Tathāgata.
In this sense, Buddhacarika represents the geography through which the Buddha journeyed during his years of austerity, meditation, and spiritual transformation from Bodhisattva to Tathāgata. It was this landscape that later became the principal pilgrimage for his followers and for aspirants on the path to Buddhahood, including Xuanzang.
Geographically, this route encompassed the kingdoms of Magadha, Vajji, Kosala, and Kuru. Magadha formed its focal point because it contained Urvela (Mahabodhi), Nalanda Mahavihara, and several other sites directly associated with the Buddha’s life and retreat. Vajji was a confederacy and the site of the Buddha’s final rainy retreat, where he announced his approaching Parinirvāṇa — his final passing beyond the cycle of birth and death.
Kosala, with its capital at Śrāvastī, was the most powerful kingdom during the Buddha’s lifetime and the place where he spent many of his rainy retreats. By the time Xuanzang visited, however, the kingdom had ceased to exist politically, though its pilgrimage sites and monasteries remained.
Kuru was an even older kingdom, predating Śākyamuni himself. A Vedic kingdom located across present-day Haryana, parts of Delhi, and western Uttar Pradesh, it occupies an important place in Buddhist sacred geography because it was here that Śākyamuni delivered the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta and the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. By Xuanzang’s time, Kuru no longer existed as a kingdom, although Buddhism continued to flourish there, albeit less prominently than in Magadha. When the Tang monk travelled through the Sacred Geography, most of these regions were under the rule of King Harsha.
The Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta and the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta are among Buddhism’s foundational discourses on the practice of mindfulness.
Xuanzang’s achievements and contributions to Chinese Buddhism
Almost a decade after Xuanzang had left Chang’an, Nalanda University received an invitation from King Śīlāditya to participate in a great scholarly debate at Kanyakubja, the capital of his kingdom. The debate brought together the Mahayana and Hinayana schools of Buddhism.
By then, Xuanzang had already established a formidable reputation as a scholar at Nalanda and was invited to preside over the gathering, which was attended by 3,000 Buddhist monks, 2,000 Brahmins, and the kings and princes of several kingdoms. The debate continued for 18 days without anyone successfully challenging his arguments.
In recognition of his scholarship, the Mahayana monks conferred upon him the title “Mahayana Deva,” meaning the “God of Mahayana,” while the Hinayana scholars honoured him with the title “Moksha Deva,” meaning the “God of Deliverance.”
In their book, Goswami and Anand term this as a congregation a “unique example of cultural exchange in the history of India-China relations.”
One of the most significant aspects of Xuanzang’s travels through the Sacred Geography was that he not only collected Buddhist scriptures but also witnessed how King Ashoka had marked the sacred landscape with monuments and commemorative landmarks, while King Kanishka had helped shape the Buddhist infrastructure along the Shadow Pilgrimage route. Together, this royal patronage, combined with diverse rituals and local narratives, ensured that the stories, teachings, and memory of the Buddha remained deeply rooted among the people.
Xuanzang carried this lasting impression back to China along with six miniature images of Śākyamuni collected from different pilgrimage sites, 150 sacred relics of the Buddha for enshrinement in monasteries across China, and 657 Sanskrit scriptures.
After returning to China, Xuanzang lived for another 19 years, devoting that period to translating these Sanskrit scriptures into Chinese.
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Despite being born into an Indian family, I bear a Greek name. Until recently, that was my only connection to Greece. Then I began exploring the history of my region, a history that spans centuries across the Indus River basin — from Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh to present-day Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan.
In the process, I discovered not only place names with Greek connections but also deep links between Greek and Indian culture, religion, spirituality, history, and archaeology, particularly in northern India. When the Buddhist Dhamma (Dharma) reached the Greeks, it was rendered as Eusebeia (“piety” or “reverence”). Thus, Eusebeia (सद्भक्ति in Sanskrit; 淑敬 in Chinese) is an attempt to explore that connection seriously and share it with the world—hopefully in ways that illuminate the enduring ties between East and West.
