Xuanzang, also known as Hiuen Tsang, was a seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator. He came to India along the Himalayas into the rich plains of the Punjab, a land watered by five rivers.
Two days out of Rajouri, he crossed the river Chenab. This section of his journey closely followed India’s present-day border with Pakistan. In fact, a number of his stops after Rajouri were thought to be in Pakistan, before he veered east, putting the rest of his route well within the Indian border.
It was from Sakala, possibly in today’s Lahore, that Mihirakula, the fifth-century Ephthalite Hun, ruled India. The story interested Xuanzang. He spent some time relating it. The Hun was responsible for a slash-and-burn policy that had resulted in the destruction of much that was Buddhist in India. The Hun had rampaged through Gandhara, or northern Pakistan, and down into Punjab, vanquishing kingdom after kingdom.
The trouble was, Xuanzang wrote, Mihirakula had been snubbed when not one single priest came forward to discuss texts on his royal demand, and only an old servant in simple robes responded. The furious Hun, or Huna, as they were called in India, issued a flat, take-no-prisoners order to crush Buddhist priests and monastic establishments across the land.
Shortly after the monk’s stop in Sakala, he and his travelling companions entered a great forest of trees east of Narasimha and, to their dismay, walked straight into a band of fifty robbers. It all happened very quickly. The men worked like professionals. Half-wild creatures, they had slipped through the forest in utter silence so that the monks barely heard them. It was as though the trees themselves suddenly took human form amd stretched out treacherous branches. The men demanded that the monks hand over their clothes and goods, and then gave chase through the marsh with its thick mass of creepers, tangled and filled with prickles.
The monks ran. The years of travel had made Xuanzang lithe. The outdoors had sharpened his senses. He and his companions spotted a ditch to the south of the marsh and ran towards it, stumbling, listening to their pursuers. Thorns dug into their shins. They stumbled across the ditch and emerged on the south-east, where they found themselves on the outskirts of a village. A Brahmin ploughed his field, following his oxen. Patches of water mirrored the sky.
‘Help!’ The monks cried. They were dishevelled, out of breath, practically naked. The man straightened, held his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun and peer at his odd apparition.
‘Robbers!’ The monks panted. It was not the first time. The farmer was frightened, but he knew what to do. The group hurried together to the village. He blew on a conch and beat drums to assemble a group of eighty men. Each picked up a stick, a spear, whatever lay at hand, and marched in the direction of the robbers. At the sight of this determined resistance, the thugs dissolved into the shadows of the forest. The travellers, robbed of their clothes and goods, set up a general wailing. Off to one side, the Chinese monk began to laugh. He held his sides and let out whoops of delight. He leaned against a tree, wiped his eyes. Until, gradually, the others fell silent and turned to their foreign friend in amazement.
The learned priest of China, breathless, his words askew, said, ‘It’s good to be alive. Who cares about a few clothes and some books?’ Then he doubled over in mirth. Perhaps it was the forlorn looks of his naked companions, or perhaps the relief of surviving death.
In the forests in the town of Takka, a day’s journey away, Xuanzang met an aged Brahmin who learned the story of his tribulations. In an overwhelming gesture of warmth, the Brahmin sent word to the largely Hindu citizens of Takka, who put aside their religious differences to pool together food and drink and lengths of cotton cloth to replace what the robbers had stolen.
The Chinese monk stayed a month, studying the masters of the Madhyamika school of thought, which had laid the foundations of the Yogacara school of idealism, which Xuanzang hungered to study in its original Sanskrit.
Xuanzang spent fourteen months travelling south of this region. Somewhere in the Punjab was the city known as Chinapati at the time. Scholars still debate its exact location. There, Xuanzang met a priest called Vinitaprabha and studied Abhidharma further with him.
He then ventured east to the kingdom of Jalandhar, its capital still known as such, and settled for four months at the Nagaradhana Monastery where he learned at the feet of Chandravarma, another eminent priest who knew Tripitaka very well indeed. The local king was good to Xuanzang.
From Jalandhar, Xuanzang threaded his way through the hills to Kuluta, or Kullu. He went north-east. He crossed mountains and ravines to arrive at the kingdom enclosed by peaks. Here he found about twenty Buddhist monasteries and some 1000 priests.
From Kullu the monk went south, about 700 li, he wrote. He passed a great mountain, crossed a wide river and came to the country of She-to-t’u-lo, which scholars have translated as Satadru. There, the monk noted with his usual precision, cereals grew abundantly in the warm, moist climate. Gold and silver and precious stones could be found easily. People wore bright silks. The place he described was of a vast, lazy prosperity. People believed in and respected the law of the Buddha, but the halls of the few monasteries he did find around the royal city were cold and deserted. There were hardly any priests.
Where was Xuanzang’s Satadru?
Cunninghum played with a mathematical triangle, made measurements with a ruler on maps, calculated distances, hemmed and hawed and finally placed Satadru at the city of Sirhind, between Chandigarh and Sanghol.
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The above excerpts are taken from Mishi Saran’s book Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang.
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