Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road

·期刊原文
Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road
Review by Edward H. Kaplan
The Historian
Vol.60 No.3
Pp.658-659
Spring 1998
COPYRIGHT 1998 Phi Alpha Theta

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Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road. By Sally Hovey
Wriggins. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. xxiv, 263. $32.50.)
Ancient and medieval China produced at least three great explorers
who are comparable to Ibn Batuta and Marco Polo: Zhang Qian (second
century B.C.), and the Buddhist monks Fa Man (fifth century A.D.)
and Xuanzang (seventh century A.D.). Of the five, perhaps the
greatest, and certainly the one with the deepest influence on his
own and related civilizations, was Xuanzang.
Xuanzang (Hsuan Tsang in the Wade-Giles transliteration) traveled
through Central and South Asia (ca. 629-645 A.D.) collecting copies
of the most important Buddhist theological works and studying with
the most important authorities on the major Buddhist schools of
thought. He became a recognized authority on Mahayana Buddhist
idealist philosophy both In India and in China after his return.
Once back in China he also wrote a book for the Chinese emperor
describing the secular aspects--cultural and political--of the
places that he had visited. This aided the Tang Dynasty in
maintaining the dominant position in Central Asia that it had
recently carved out.
The book that was written for the emperor and a biography of
Xuanzang, written by a colleague during his lifetime, are still
extant, as are many of the holy texts translated by Xuanzang. They
still provide information on the history and culture of India,
Afghanistan, and Central Asia to historians, anthropologists, and
even archaeologists (who carry Xuanzang to their digs much as
Schliemann carried Homer, and to even greater effect).
Throughout the millennium and a third since Xuanzang and his
colleague laid down their writing brushes, writers, both religious
and secular, have repeatedly translated or retold their complex tale
of salvation and earthly history. So intrinsically vivid is the
material that Xuanzang has provided, that the best of such works
inevitably combine high popularization with synthesis of the most
important works of technical scholarship.
Sally Hovey Wriggins's Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road
will fulfill the role of the standard high popularization, which has
been played for readers of English since the translation in 1971 of
Rene Grousset's In the Footsteps of the Buddha, which first appeared
in French in 1929. Like Grousset, Wriggins approaches both Buddhism
and its several Asian homelands as a sympathetic, but non-Buddhist,
outsider. Her account is in some ways superior to that of Grousset,
because it synthesizes the scholarly works on both the historical
and anthropological-archaeological sides that have appeared since
that time. Wriggins also provides detailed, but unobtrusive,
endnotes, a bibliography, glossary, index, and a rich supply of
illustrations. Like Grousset, Wriggins places her illustrations
(except, because of technical reasons, the color plates, which are
grouped together) within a page of the narratives that each
illustrates.
All college and university libraries, and many public libraries,
will want to obtain this work, which is destined largely to replace
Grousset's earlier study.