A RECORD OF THE BUDDHIST RELIGION AS PRACTISED IN INDIA AND THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO (A.D. 671-695)

After the introduction of Buddhism into China, a.d. 67 ', Fa-hien was the first to make a pilgrimage in India, the holy land of the Buddhists. His journey, which lasted about sixteen years (a.d. 399-414), was detailed in his F6-kue-ki . Next followed the travels of Sun-yun and Hwui-seng, a.d. 518; unfortunately,however, their narrative 3 is very short, and not to be compared with that of the other travellers. Much later, in the T'ang dynasty, the Augustan age of Chinese Buddhist literature, we have first the famous Hiuen Thsang, of whom we know so much through his work, Si-yu-ki, the Record of the Western Kingdom . His travels in India covered some seventeen years (a.d. 629-645), and anything that came under his notice was fully recorded in the said work, which is an indispensable text-book for Indian history and geography.

Soon after Hiuen Thsang's death, another, by no means less famous, Buddhist, I-tsingby name, started for India, a.d. 671, and arrived in Tamralipti, at the mouth of the Hooghly, a.d. 673. He studied in Nalanda, the centre of Buddhist learning, at the east end of the Ra^agr/ha valley, for a considerable time, and collected some 400 Sanskrit texts, amounting to 500,000 .dokas. On his way home he stayed...........................


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