Xuanzang

Xuanzang became a monk young and rose quickly as a scholar, but he was troubled by the contradictions he found in the Chinese translations of Buddhist texts, especially on questions of the mind and consciousness that the Yogacara school addressed, and concluded that he would have to go to India and read the scriptures in their own language. The Tang court refused him a travel permit. Around 629 he left Chang'an anyway, slipping west past the frontier garrisons and across the deserts of the Gobi and the Taklamakan, nearly dying of thirst on the way.

In the oasis kingdom of Turfan he found a devout Buddhist king, Qu Wentai, who tried to keep him and, when Xuanzang held out with a hunger strike, instead furnished him with escorts, letters and gold for the road ahead. He crossed the Tian Shan, skirted the Central Asian khanates, passed through Gandhara and Kashmir, and reached the Buddhist heartland of the Ganges plain. His goal was Nalanda, the greatest monastic university of the age, where he studied for several years under the aged master Silabhadra, learned Sanskrit deeply, and debated the philosophical schools of India. When he turned for home in the 640s he carried, by the traditional count, some 657 texts, along with relics and images: having travelled, over roughly seventeen years, a distance usually reckoned in the thousands of miles.

Xuanzang returned in 645 to a hero's welcome. The emperor Taizong, who had once forbidden his journey, now wanted him as an adviser; Xuanzang declined office and asked instead for the means to translate what he had brought back. The state gave him a bureau of scholar-monks, and for the last two decades of his life he ran one of the most productive translation projects in the history of religion, rendering on the order of seventy-five works and well over a thousand fascicles of Sanskrit text into Chinese.

His translations were prized for a new precision, and some reshaped Chinese Buddhism. He produced the version of the short Heart Sutra that East Asia still chants, and in 650 the Bhaishajyaguru (Medicine Buddha) Sutra that carried that healing cult through China, Korea and Japan. From the Yogacara texts he assembled the Cheng weishi lun and founded the Faxiang, or "Consciousness-Only," school, the most rigorously philosophical of the Chinese Buddhist traditions. Alongside the scriptures he dictated the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (646), a survey of the roughly one hundred and thirty countries he had seen or heard of, a work later used by archaeologists to relocate lost Buddhist sites in India, and the seed of the fantastical Ming novel Journey to the West.

Xuanzang died in 664 and was buried near Chang'an; his remains were later moved, and at some point a portion of his skull came to rest at a temple in Nanjing. There the trail goes quiet for centuries, until the Second World War. In late 1942 Japanese troops occupying Nanjing, digging near the ruins of the Grand Bao'en Temple to build a shrine, turned up a stone casket whose inscription identified the bone inside as a parietal-bone relic of Xuanzang.

What followed says as much about modern politics as about medieval piety. Under public pressure the occupation authorities and the collaborationist Wang Jingwei government negotiated, and the relic was divided into portions sent to Japan, to Beijing and back to Nanjing. Over the decades since, it has been subdivided more than a dozen times as a diplomatic and devotional gift, so that fragments identified with the original are now enshrined at multiple sites across mainland China, in Japan, in Taiwan, the portion once in Japan was given to the Xuanzang Temple at Sun Moon Lake, and in India, at the site of Nalanda where he once studied. This atlas records that dispersed relic as the Skull Relic of Xuanzang, an artifact whose modern history is nearly as remarkable as the monk's own journey: a seventh-century pilgrim who, in fragments, went on travelling.