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Xuanzang on the Silk Road
monks, 2,000 Hindus and Jains to hear him proclaim the superiority of Mahayana Buddhism over Hindu and Jain beliefs as well as other kinds of Buddhism. It was a grand finale for his years in India.
When Xuanzang finally departed in 643 CE he was given a military escort to carry the books and images he had been collecting from the Indian subcontinent. King Harsha presented him with his best and biggest elephant capable of carrying eight men as well as the thousands of gold and silver pieces given him for expenses along the way. The king also provided him with letters to rulers on the homeward route. Only 4 years later this remarkable, versatile monarch was gone; for the next 3 centuries there would be disorder and famine in northern India. Spear, the modern historian,notes,
Beginning with the fall of the Guptas and becoming complete after the death of Harsha in 647 A.D., north Indian history is confused and obscure for some five or six hundred years. As the Dark Ages divide the classical age of the Greek and the Roman, so do these centuries divide modern from ancient India.[xvii]
Having decided not to return by sea, Xuanzang and his party turned to the northeast. They crossed northern India by way of Jalandhara and Taxila returning in the opposite direction by roughly the same route Xuanzang’s caravan had taken 13 years before. At length in 644 CE Xuanzang arrived at Hund on the Indus River but here a storm rose up and overturned his boats so that he lost 50 of his precious manuscripts. He sent to Udyana for extra copies of his scriptures, waiting 2 months hoping for their arrival at Kapisa. At length his caravan reached the Hindu Kush mountains. Like Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his elephant and baggage train, their crossing in 644 CE proved to be far more difficult than they had imagined. Xuanzang’s biographer stated that their caravan consisted only of 5 priests, 20 followers, 1 elephant, 10 asses and 4 horses. At length they descended to Kunduz on the Oxus river where they waited another month for copies of the lost manuscripts.
Instead of returning the way he had come to India on the northern caravan roads to Samarkand he ascended to the upper reaches of the Oxus River, climbing the Pamir range to reach Kashgar.(This was the route Marco Polo followed on his way to China in 1271 C.E.) Xuanzang crossed near the Tagdumbash Pamirs which Marco Polo has called the Roof of the World. This is where the ranges of the Hindu Kush crossing modern-day Afghanistan, the Karakorum in northern Pakistan and the Pamirs in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and the Tian Shan range in China all meet in the Pamir knot.
On the other side of the Pamirs Xuanzang’s caravan again met tragedy when they were attacked by robbers in a very narrow defile. His elephant was chased by bandits, fell into the river and drowned. Aurel Stein has located what he believes to be [next page]