Chinese Buddhism
A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms
Travels ca. 399–414; English translation 1886 · China, Central Asia and South Asia · Faxian
The Diamond Sutra, 868 - dated to the day in its own colophon.
Source & rights
- What this is
- Material context
- Object
- Book
- Title
- The Diamond Sutra, frontispiece and text
- Date
- Dated 11 May 868
- Held by
- British Library, Or. 8210/P.2
- Licence
- CC0
- This copy
- Hosted at the size published by the source; not altered.
- Retrieved
- 2026-08-28
An object of the same period and kind. Not a witness to this text and not a depiction of its events.
Recovered from the sealed cave library at Dunhuang. Four centuries later than the account on this page, and evidence of the material world that account belongs to: a textual culture that copied, printed, dated and stored, and whose habits of documentation are why anything of it survives.
Around 399 a Chinese monk in his sixties set out west on foot, crossed the deserts and mountains, spent years in India, and came home by sea. He wrote down roads, river crossings, distances between monasteries, how many monks lived where, and what the local rules of practice were.
Marvels appear too. But at the end of one chapter he does something almost nobody else in this collection does: he says he never got to the place he has just described, and that he is repeating what he was told there.
What the source is
A Chinese monk's account of some fifteen years of travel to and from South Asia, written in the first person. It records roads, rivers, distances, monastic populations, rules of practice, relics, and the traditions attached to particular places.
Miraculous events appear in it, but they are not what it is mostly about, and - crucially - the text often signals whether Faxian saw something himself, was told it locally, or is reporting a received tradition.
The report
Historical translation
Fâ-Hien, however, was after all unable to go there; but having received the (above) accounts from men of the country, he has narrated them.This is why the entry exists. Having filled a chapter with an account of a place and its marvels, the author closes it by saying that he never got there and is repeating what he was told locally. He does not blur the two, he does not leave it to a reader to work out, and he does not omit the chapter on the grounds that he could not verify it - he keeps it and labels it. That is the distinction between personal observation and local report, made in the source's own voice, and almost no other text in this collection makes it at all.
Why it is in this archive
This is the best example in the launch collection of a source that distinguishes its own modes of knowing. Personally observed, locally reported, and inherited tradition are three different things, and a text that keeps them apart is doing something most of this archive's other sources do not.
It is also a control. Read from end to end rather than mined for its strangest paragraphs, it is largely a record of ordinary religious life at a particular moment - which is a useful corrective to the impression an archive like this one is otherwise likely to give.
The distinction the text supports could be marked at the level of individual statements. That is a task for a later revision and it requires reading the whole thing carefully, in an edition, rather than searching it for the parts that are interesting.
How close is the source?
The surviving text presents itself as the words of the person who reports the experience.
01 · Author and traveller
Faxian
02 · Translated and annotated by
James Legge, 1886
Legge's notes are a nineteenth-century scholarly apparatus and are not part of the fifth-century text.
03 · Digitised by
Project Gutenberg
Project Nikolaos annotation
Written by this project. Not part of the source, and not a translation of anything in it.
He tells you which things he saw. Almost nobody else in this collection does that, and he did it fifteen hundred years ago without being asked.
Details, provenance and rights
- Experiencer state
- Awake
- Reported agency
- No agency claimed
- Locomotion claim
- None
- Physical trace
- Material trace reported
- Witness or speaker
- Faxian
- Recorder / translator
- James Legge, translator and annotator, 1886
- Edition
- James Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, 1886
- Rights
- May be reproduced from a verified public-domain edition
- Cultural sensitivity
- Ordinary historical context
Provenance notes
- Legge's transliterations and place identifications reflect the state of the field in 1886, and his spelling of the author's name is preserved here as printed.
- The text has its own manuscript history in Chinese, which this entry does not describe.
- No Chinese is quoted. The Gutenberg edition is Legge's English with his own introduction and notes, and this project has not established which characters stand behind this sentence. Printing an original we have not located would be the same error the entry is about.
- The parenthesis in the quotation is Legge's, not the author's. Nineteenth-century translators supplied connective words in brackets as a matter of course, and it is left visible here rather than tidied away.
The 1886 Legge translation is public domain. It is quoted, not mirrored: this project holds no copy of the book.
From the same shelf
Grouped by the tradition that produced them. Nothing here claims they share a cause.
