"What is history but a fable agreed upon." Napoleon


A brief disclaimer- this entry is first draft of a potential article on the wandering monk, Xuan Zang (also spelled Hsuan Tsang). Unfortunately, I don't really have the biographical material at this point to back up the article. I don't even have a copy of Xuan Zang's "Journey to the West in the Great Tang Dynasty" to use for back round information. What this article simply does is record what Yasha and I saw as we followed in his footsteps.


I


If I were to ask you what famous classical adventurer walked the farthest over the greatest period of time you would undoubtedly reply "Marco Polo, of course!" Ah, but I didn't tell you that this was a trick question. I used the word 'famous', and 1.6 billion Chinese would just have assuredly answered "Xuan Zang!" As far as famous goes, numbers win out.


Xuan Zang was a monk, a decidedly brilliant Buddhist monk, living in the 7th century CE. When he discovered inconsistencies and omissions in the available Chinese translations of Sanskrit originals he promptly decided that he would go there himself, to India, and translate the texts himself. Yet Xuan Zang was more than just brilliant, he was also remarkably dedicated and perseverant. First he learned Sanskrit, then he learned Tocharian, the lingua franca of the western regions. Then when the Tang emperor, Tang Taizong, refused him passage to the west he simply slipped away at night, fleeing from a comfortable life in the greatest city on earth to that of a wandering indigent. It would be 17 years before he returned to the Tang capital of Xi'an.


Today, Xuan Zang's story has been told and retold in China a hundred different times. The Ming era classic, "A Journey to the West", immortalized Xuan Zang as the monk Triptika. Aided by magical creatures, his story continues today in Anime cartoons and poorly costumed Chinese TV productions. And yet, 1300 years after his death one still wonders, who was he?, what did he feel, what did he see? With a month left on our Chinese visa Yasha and I decided to find out. We would go where Xuan Zang went, within reason that is, and try to see, if not what he saw, but what is there to see now.


They say that every journey begins with a single footstep; but for us, retracing Xuan Zang's trail began by following our nose. Behind the pleasant tree lined courtyards of the Great Mosque in Xi'an lies a narrow alley entirely given over to the pleasures of the flesh. Meat is everywhere, unrefrigerated, hanging on hooks, on tables, or sometimes simply spread on a bloody sheet of canvas, on the ground. The smell, needless to say, is indescribable. Noodle and kebab houses are a dime a dozen, yet it is the more arcane practices of animal rendering that attract the nose.


In a little decrepit courtyard full of broken bicycle parts you can see a man standing in a sea of frothy lung, doggedly chopping away. Along Beiguang Jie there is a whole string of liver stands (turn your face away!) with reeking tables groaning under the weight of baked liver, swollen like bowling balls, slowly cooking a second time in the sun. And then just when you feel like you need to rinse your nose out with salt water a new smell insinuates itself, something you've smelled before, something you love. There, virtually hidden by a crowd of pushing customers, is a take out sandwich stand. All they sell is beef brisket, corned beef, and for less than a dollar you can have a piece of Muslim flat bread, so hot that you can barely hold it, filled with a spicy and fragrant meat so soft that it falls apart in your mouth. Why do they even wrap it? In the best tradition of American fast food we merely moved several meters away from the crowd before gorging ourselves on a simple, but guilty pleasure.


Ironically, as you move away from the Muslim quarter Xi'an feels less like a village, something Xuan Zang would understand, and more like the modern Chinese city that it is. Xi'an is locally famous as the place to score a cheap mobile phone. Along the repetitious main streets and under the futuristic office towers it seems as if little else is sold. The immense city walls, 16km square, look as if they were built yesterday- and they probably were! Festooned with a million red lanterns the walls attract wealthy tourists like a moth to the flame. We got burned ourselves, paying 40 yuan apiece to climb to the top to view what is essentially an artificial set piece. That is the China of today, you pay more, but get less.


This, plainly, isn't what Xuan Zang was all about. I began roaming farther and farther afield, searching for a place where the mind of the great Tang philosopher might still reside. On my tourist map of Xi'an I found two spots that looked promising, two spots of green far from the city center. Tang pleasure gardens perhaps? One long day I ventured forth- only to find a wilderness of plastic recycling yards, coal depots, and grandiose construction projects. I wandered down increasingly more narrow lanes bordered by seemingly endless industrial brick walls. In the haze of early summer skeletal apartment blocks, apparently abandoned, ringed the horizon. Eventually the path turned to dirt, and I realized that I was lost. A battered three wheel cart bumped past me and I was pressed back against the brick wall. Then, from behind me, I heard a bird sing, and my heart filled with an unexpected joy. For a second, just a second, I felt close to the world of Xuan Zang.



II



To the west of Xi'an the landscape begins to change. Rain fall decreases, and the mountain ranges that rise from the desert are black, devoid of vegetation and ominous. This is the land of the Hexi Corridor, a narrow 1,000 km strip of irrigated land hemmed in north and south by the mountains. For China, the Hexi Corridor has always been its window on the West. Pilgrims, caravans, bandits, the wealth of Asia and the Occident traveled back and forth along its storied length. Xuan Zang walked here, and saw some of the things that we saw. Above all else the Hexi Corridor is an agricultural place, in the rhythms of socially conservative farm life one can see a bit of the past. In fact, nothing is more primeval Chinese than the image of a man, or a women for that matter, with a hoe. The metal head rises at the end of its five foot wooden shaft, pauses teasingly at the top of its arc, and then descends again and again into the earth.


We stopped in Lanzhou to look at the farming and religious life of the Hexi Corridor. Xuan Zang would have seen similar fields of wheat and yellow rape seed. He would have seen men harvesting the wheat by hand, with a small sickle, and then stacking it before the south facing entrance to the family compound. He would have seen the horse and donkey carts that are still used and he would have smelled the shit running behind the walls of the village. This much hasn't changed.


We traveled to Xiahe, a Tibetan community four hours by bus south of Lanzhou. In 630CE, when Xuan Zang passed by here, there were no Tibetan monks or Tibetan monasteries. The grass lands immediately to the south of the Hexi Corridor were then home to brigands and nomads, barbarians by Chinese standards, while Buddhism was unknown here. But today Xiahe contains Labrang, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries outside of the TAR. With monastic life largely absent from China since the Cultural Revolution it is at Labrang where one can see something like what Xuan Zang saw. Labrang lies at the base of a cliff, with four or five large prayer halls dedicated to various deities and literally hundreds and hundreds of monks' dwellings. A three km outer wall, studded with thousands of large prayer wheels, surrounds the monastery and is focus of pilgrimage for Tibetans from far and wide.


Tibetan Buddhism varies in many ways from the mainstream Mahayana of the Tang era and it is easy to emphasize the differences, not the similarities. Yet in his day Xuan Zang himself was a proponent of the Yogacarya or Mind Only School. Today this school has been absorbed into Tibetan Buddhism and forms much of the basis for advanced philosophical debate. But perhaps it is not so much the details of the philosophy that Xuan Zang would have recognized but the everyday facts of life of a large monastery; the hi jinks of the novice monks at early morning prayers or the solemn demeanor of the ordained monks squatting in a line in a back alley, peeing into the dust. Mostly Xuan Zang would have recognized the predawn coolness at early morning prayers and the seemingly timeless chant, "I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take refuge in the Sangha!"


One afternoon we slipped away from the monastery. A narrow valley led between the arid hills, leading to the west. We tried to ford the creek, failed, and then scrambled up a ridge, gaining 500m through flowering wild rose. From the summit we could see that the hills diminished into flat grazing grounds. To the west there was a sea of grass, undulating gently, bisected by a little road that wound itself into extinction. We ate a lunch of nectarines and Muslim flat bread, gazing far into the distance, where grasslands, mountains and sky all met in a cerulean haze. Undoubtedly Xuan Zang would have identified this view... well not this exactly... but the view of distance, and how that translated into time and effort. He would have looked into the distance and understood the transience of it all, and how out of this transience, or impermanence, all the infinity of forms arise.






III





The days that followed passed in a blur of movement and heat, of train stations, bus stations, and cheap Chinese food. Lanzhou, Zangye, Jiayuguan; now they are just names of cities along the Hexi Corridor. From the window of our bus a bucolic landscape scrolled by; fields of cabbage and beans bordered by copses of cottonwoods. Packed earth greenhouses marched across the valley floor. Once I saw a man with a hoe over his shoulder leading a white horse by its bridle; five minutes later I saw a pig and a cow standing nose to nose in deep meditation. Then the cow jumped back, evidently surprised by the extent of their unspoken inter species communication.



But what I remember most of all was the heat. How could Xuan Zang stand it? And him in heavy monk robes! Did he continue wearing the brown and grey of everyday monk's attire, as illustrations from the time show him? Or did he shuck down instead into an orange loincloth, and find shelter under a broad brimmed straw hat?



Like Xuan Zang, we faced the difficulties of petty Chinese bureaucrats and the weaknesses of our own bodies. In Zangye, after paying to see a thousand year old reclining Buddha - the largest in China - we discovered the entire statue wrapped in scaffolding, the Buddha barely visible in the dark, hiding the heads of the disciples surrounding him. When we complained and demanded our money back the gatekeepers merely laughed. How funny we must appear to them! The Chinese themselves are too afraid to complain. To stand up, to expose yourself, is not a Chinese quality. In Jiayuguan my body failed me. I woke, blew my nose, and gave myself a hernia! Despairing, I consoled myself with thoughts of all the other pilgrims that have walked this path. Many were killed by wild beasts, others encountered bandits that stripped them and left them alone to die in the desert. Supposedly Xuan Zang himself traveled at night, both to avoid the heat as well as the ever present eyes of the dacoits.



From Jiayuguan we turned south, leaving the Hexi Corridor behind. The mountains that had funneled us along the Corridor, the Black Mountains and the Quinlin Shan, faded to nothing. In their place was a seemingly endless stony desert. On occasion we passed a remnant of a silk road fort, it's sun baked clay bricks now eroded like a child's sandcastle after the tide has come in then gone away again. The bleakness of it all was heartbreaking.



One the southern edge of the Gobi Desert are a series of small ravines, nothing dramatic, where an seasonal stream cut it's way below the desert floor. Cottonwoods and poplar lie close to the ravines edge, while around the brackish pools of the drying watercourse thick rushes hide both raptors and songbirds alike. 2,000 years ago Buddhist monks and craftsmen came to these ravines, carving three separate cave complexes within a 150km radius. The greatest of these is are the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang.



Xuan Zang had passed through this area on his return trip from India. In the intervening years the desert has advanced, Chinese dynasties rose and fell, the caves were looted by westerners,

and finally, used as a stable by fleeing White Russian Cavalry. Today the caves see some 5,000 visitors a day, all carefully managed by multilingual docents with instructions to show each group a mere 10 out of the 492 caves. If you want to see more you pay more; this is China, after all.



I was unprepared, however, for the scope and grandeur of the Mogao Caves. There are two giant Buddha Maitreya statues, one 35m and the other 31m in separate caves, with enormous faces moulded delicately in the high Tang style. In another cave is a Reclining Buddha of equal length and sensitivity surrounded by grieving Arhats. And then there are cave after cave of exquisite frescoes guarded by giant clay gatekeepers, their smiles still as ferocious as yesterday.

It's difficult to critique a place such as this; it's a tour de force, truely world class.



Yet the beauty invites a question: Who was there to see it? These caves are virtually inaccessible, even today. In the classical era one would need to cross hundreds of miles of desert just to reach the next oasis, and then what? Where the Mogao Caves the ancient Chinese version of "build it and they will come"? Or is there more to it than that? Xuan Zang, in fact, wasn't advancing into a vacuum. The silk road was populated with settlements of Persians and Greeks, Turkmen and red-haired, green-eyed Russians. There were soldiers, mercenaries, camp followers and thieves, nuns, whores, holy men and fools. Great fortunes were made and lost in the transportation of goods. Along with the goods, inevitably, came ideas. The Great Mosque in Xi'an, for example, was founded in 741- a mere 100 years after the death of Mohammad. There may not have been a mobile phone net work in the 7th century, yet information still traveled surprisingly fast.



IV



We traveled onward. In two weeks time we traveled as far as Xuan Zang did in a year. Then he had slowed in Turphan, and so did we.


At 154m below sea level Turphan must be one of the most unlikely places for a settlement in the world, yet it has prospered for nearly 2,000 years. We alighted in Tulufan, Turphan's distant railway station, after an unpleasant night's journey on a hard seat. Instantly we were staggered.

Not only by the heat, but by the terrain. Turphan lay 50km away and 1,500m below us, a tiny green oasis at the bottom of what looked like a crater on Mars. The distances were vast, the heat inescapable. So it was with some trepidation that we continued onward, roaring down the hill towards Turphan in a cheap cab, the windows wide open, the 45C heat pinning our ears back and making our eyes water.


Turphan is alien in many respects. Despite the presence of only one time zone for all of China you can still feel Turphan, and all of Xinjiang Province, for that matter, starting to drift away. Where does allegence lie? To the center, the East, or towards the Turkic Muslims groups of the West. This question has been asked often before.

Xuan Zang spent several unwilling years in Turphan. Forced to teach Buddhism by royal decree he was a most reluctant tutor. One long hot afternoon we traveled to the old royal palace site at Gaochang, 35km to the east. We paralleled the Flaming Mountains before dropping down into the oasis surrounding the old city of Gaochang.
Like Turphan, Gaochang is primarily a Uighur town. Old men in white shirts and pill box hats, their whispy white beard lying stiffly on their chest, sat on the kerb, watching the world as they knew it pass by. The women, in open toed high heels, glittering Russian style dress, and dark head scarves reminded, strangely, of a picture I had seen of the old Persian Shah's wife. Beautiful, cosmopolitan, distant. And then one saw the palace site...

Attacked by Kublai Khan in the 14th century the city was burned and the population, as they say, put to the sword. Those who were left promptly converted to Islam. Today, passing through the immense city walls, is like entering a grave site. At first there is a sense of disappointment; is this all there is? But then, in looking closer you can see that the city is nothing more than a slag heap that has melted and while dripping pooled on the ground. In places, a dark hole opens into a cellar where you dare not descend. Jutting from the ruin of the royal palace are two tall spears of bricks, unknowable cyphers of what had once been. These were the remains of the Lecture Pagoda, the location were Xuan Zang spent his years of enforced tutelage. Everything else is gone - burned, blown away, now dust cycling the globe. I sat down in the shade of a melted wall and drank what little water I had left. The fear and suffering here must have been intense, as hot as the fire. Perhaps the souls of all those who perished here, like dust motes dancing in the sky, still remain here. Now that was a disquieting thought. I rose and left before the setting sun could paint the ruins red.

V

Xuan Zang's travels were never easy. On the road from Turphan to Kashgar he hid from robbers. Unseen, he considered himself lucky to have escaped death. I suffered an almost similar fate in Kashgar. While changing the film of my camera at a vegetable market I neglected my tripod. Behind my back the tripod was snatched, and just like that, it was gone. Some people saw him run, some people didn't, but no one, not even the police, spoke English or could alter the fact that the tripod just wasn't coming back. But I was lucky. I wasn't killed by wild beasts, or sold into slavery, or any number of less desirable fates. In the end we will lose everything, even our bodies. A tripod, regardless of price, is really a most inconsequential thing - or at least so I told myself.

Nor did it dim my appreciation of Kashgar. Surrounded by mountain ranges whose names are legend - the Tien Shan and the Pamirs - Kashgar is a polyglot mixture of every Central Asian race. I loved it. You could sit in a second story tea and dumpling shop in the old city and just watch faces all day. Who were they? How did they get here? History was writ large in every face.

Along the poplar lined streets leading into the city donkey carts still make haste in the early morning hours. But by late afternoon people move at a more languid pace. Smoke from the kebab stands rises into an air like incense for the Gods, calling the men from their evening prayers to the more convivial life on the streets. And there, unfortunately, we must leave them. From Kashagar Xuan Zang struck out to the west, across the Bedal Pass. Regretably, international protocol forbids us from following him. Instead we will follow the path of least resistance but, perhaps, of greater danger. Tomorrow we will leave for Kunjerab Pass and the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan.

Just as Xuan Zang confronted danger by praying not only for his own well-being but for the well-being of all creatures so do we. Just as compassion was his armor may it be our's also. Hopefully his spirit and our's will walk together where ever we may go, whether it is to Pakistan, or to India, or into (gasp!) the deepest heart of America.

Peace.