5

A Tiny Text by a Giant Translator

CHANG’AN, SITUATED on the southern bank of the river Wei in the Guanzhong Basin (present-day Shaanxi Province), was an orderly gridded megalopolis guarded by massive dirt walls. In the first part of the eighth century, this powerful capital city had a population of more than one million people, as well as a prospering culture and commerce. Chang’an was on its way to being the largest city in the world.

At that time, Chang’an was under the rule of Emperor Tai (599–649), originally named Li Shimin. The ruler of the preceding Sui Dynasty, Emperor Yang, was a vicious tyrant whose corrupt rule induced a revolt of farmers all over China. Foreseeing a collapse of the Sui Dynasty, Shimin had urged his father — the grand lord Li Yuan (566–635) — to raise an army against the emperor. Following the overthrow in 617, the young Shimin successfully led diplomatic and military campaigns, abolished the Sui Dynasty, and initiated the Tang Dynasty in 618, installing his father as the founding emperor. After pacifying revolts and surviving his jealous brothers’ attempt to kill him, Shimin asked his father to retire, thus becoming the second emperor of the Tang Dynasty in 626 at age twenty-eight. The entire nation was united again. He also succeeded in swallowing neighboring states in North and West Asia and subordinating southern nations, thus making China’s domain larger than ever.

When Emperor Tai gave his first audience to Xuanzang in 645, Tai was forty-seven years old and Xuanzang forty-two. Instead of punishing him for disobeying his edict proscribing foreign travel, Tai praised him for his courage and achievement. That same year, the emperor assisted Xuanzang in launching a national project to translate a great number of Sanskrit scriptures into Chinese. Tai gave Xuanzang a temple called Hongfu Monastery in Chang’an. He also hired many editing assistants, including twelve monk-scholars from all over China, to check the accuracy of the renditions. Xuanzang dictated his translations directly from the original texts.

Many prominent scholars and artists, including the calligraphers Yu Shinan and Chu Suiliang, served at Tai’s court. An admirer of the fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi, Emperor Tai made an extensive effort to collect and study Xizhi’s masterpieces. Tai himself started a custom of writing inscriptions in cursive style, moving away from the customary formal script. He went on to become one of the most renowned calligraphy masters of the classical period.

What made Tai one of the greatest monarchs in Chinese history was that he knew his own shortcomings and accepted others’ advice. (Later he wrote a four-fascicle book, Imperial Model [Di Fan], mentioning his own failures, as an admonition for his crown prince.) Tai reduced tax rates and eased punishment. He perfected the examination system for hiring different levels of government officials, which was open to anyone of any background — the system that had been initiated by Emperor Wen, the first monarch of the Sui Dynasty (r. 581–604).

In 646, upon imperial request, Xuanzang completed a report about the topography, history, customs, and politics of the places he had visited in Central Asia and India. His twelve-scroll work, Records of the Western Regions Compiled during the Great Tang Dynasty (Datang Xiyu Ji), was the most extensive and detailed book of geographical descriptions that had ever been written.¹ The popular sixteenth-century epic Journey to the West (Xiyu Ji), by Wu Chengen — stories of a monk guarded by a powerful monkey, boar warriors, and a river monster — is based on Xuanzang’s writing.

In 648, Xuanzang completed his one-hundred-fascicle translation of Asanga’s Stages of Yogachara (Yogacharabhumi). (A scroll, or fascicle, is a chapter-length text assembled in a separate volume.) In the same year, Emperor Tai asked Xuanzang to take an official position at the court. Xuanzang declined, declaring that his life’s mission was to clarify the Buddha’s dharma. Tai was impressed with Xuanzang’s determination, and soon after, the emperor wrote an introduction to Xuanzang’s translation of the sutras under the title “Great Tang’s Three-Basket Sacred Teaching.”² (The Buddhist canon is called the Tripitaka, or Three Baskets. The “baskets” — or “collections” — consist of sutras, precepts, and later scholars’ treatises. One who has mastered the entire scripture is called a Tripitaka dharma teacher, or simply Tripitaka. This was our translator Xuanzang’s title.)

Also in 648, the Crown Prince — a close disciple of Xuanzang — became a senior monk at the Da Ci’en Monastery in Chang’an. The translation academy built on the northwestern side of the great monastery compound was then the center for national translation work. Soon after that, according to Huili’s biography of Xuanzang, Emperor Tai became gravely ill and asked Xuanzang to be near him at the Cuiwei Palace on Zhongnan Mountain, in the south of the capital city. Although Huili did not mention it, a later record says that Xuanzang translated the Heart Sutra at the palace on the twenty-fourth day of the fifth month of 649. It was transcribed by Monk Zhiren.³ Three days later, Emperor Tai passed away, and the Crown Prince ascended the throne as Emperor Gao.

In 659, Xuanzang and his foremost disciple, Kuiji (632–682), made a ten-fascicle summary of Dharmapala’s Treatise on Realization of Consciousness Only that was to become the fundamental text for understanding the Yogachara philosophy.

Afterward, Xuanzang spent two years translating the most comprehensive collection of the Prajna Paramita scriptures. From the original two hundred thousand Sanskrit lines, he created six hundred scrolls, which made this work the largest Buddhist scripture ever.⁴ (A “line,” or shloka, when used to measure the length of a Buddhist text, consists of thirty-two syllables.) On completing the translation of the Maha Prajna Paramita Sutra in 663, he exclaimed: “This sutra pacifies the nation. It is a great treasure to the world. This completion is to be celebrated by everyone in the sangha!” He was sixty-two years old.

Xuanzang then asked one of his students to count the texts he had translated. The result was seventy-four texts in 1,338 scrolls. This surpassed his great predecessor Kumarajiva’s seventy-three texts in 383 scrolls.

Although Xuanzang limited his role to that of master translator and did not write commentaries of his own, he was the most influential Buddhist of his time and had thousands of students. He encouraged his senior disciples to write commentaries. His cotranslator Kuiji — who became known as the author of one hundred treatises — founded the Faxiang (Dharma Characteristics) School. This school provided a most advanced theoretical ground for the development of the Tiantai School as well as for the formation of the Huayuan (Avatamsaka) School in the seventh and eighth centuries. Other students of Xuanzang — the monks Dosho, Chitsu, and Chitatsu — developed the Hosso School, the Japanese form of the Faxiang School. Xuanzang also helped three monks, Puguang, Fabao, and Shentai, to form the Jushe School, which is based on the Treatise on the Treasury of Dharma Studies (Abhidharma Kosha Shastra) by Vasubandhu — a compilation of pre-Mahayana ontological theories. The Jushe School developed into the Kusha School in Japan. Xuanzang’s fresh use of words in translation, combined with his high degree of accuracy, stimulated a surge of Buddhist studies and thought, resulting in the rise of a golden age of Buddhism in China and beyond.

Xuanzang passed away in 664. It is said that over one million people bowed at his coffin and over thirty thousand people stayed overnight at his tomb. Emperor Gao said in grief, “We have lost our national treasure.”