Xuanzang’s travels to Bengal and beyond : The man, the pilgrim and the Monkey King
It is the autumn of 629 CE.
Crossing the western gates of the imperial city of Chang’an, on the north-west frontier of Tang China, a young Chinese monk walks into the vast and arid Gobi Desert, carrying only a small lamp, a waterskin and a traveller’s pack. Leaving the crowded markets and watchtowers of the capital behind, the road ahead dissolves into a pale wilderness of gravel, dust and wind.
Xuanzang, not yet 30, has left the capital without imperial permission. Foreign travel has been restricted amid conflict on China’s frontiers. Border guards have orders to stop unauthorised journeys—by force, if necessary. Xuanzang must avoid the main roads and slip past watchtowers in darkness.
During the day, under the scorching sun, the unforgiving Gobi Desert is harsh enough. But at night, the temperature plunges sharply. Xuanzang moves beneath a cold scatter of stars, shielding his flame from the wind and following the faint tracks left by caravans. Each mouthful of water must be measured. Each direction must be remembered.
Xuanzang is on a pilgrimage with a mission. His destination lies thousands of miles away: Nalanda, the great monastic university of northern India. By Xuanzang’s lifetime, Chinese Buddhism was already centuries old, but its scriptures had arrived in layers: carried by merchants and monks, translated by different hands and sometimes rendered in ways that appeared to contradict one another. Xuanzang wanted to compare these Chinese texts with Sanskrit originals and study their doctrines with Indian masters.
Over the next 16 years, he passed through the oasis kingdoms of the Silk Roads, crossed the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains, travelled through what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan, and entered the intellectual and sacred geography of the Indian subcontinent. He visited sites associated with the Buddha, debated scholars at royal courts and spent years at Nalanda, the great monastic centre in present-day Bihar, studying under the elderly master Śīlabhadra.
Xuanzang left Nalanda sometime in the late 630s and moved through a string of small kingdoms—Iranaparvata, Champa—before arriving in Pundravardhana, a kingdom whose capital is generally identified today with the ruins of Mahasthangarh in northern Bangladesh, one of the oldest continuously identified urban sites in the Bengal delta.
A country of rivers and monasteries
Bengal in the seventh century was a mosaic of kingdoms and regions divided—and connected—by the Ganges, Brahmaputra and their innumerable tributaries. Xuanzang’s record names Pundravardhana in the north, Samatata in the south-east, the port of Tamralipti in the west and Karnasuvarna, the royal centre associated with the kingdom of Gauda. His itinerary is one of the most valuable surviving descriptions of this landscape before the rise of the Pala empire.
Crossing the Ganges, Xuanzang entered Pundravardhana and found a low, damp and fertile land, broken by ponds and flowering woods. Its people, he wrote, valued learning. He counted more than 20 monasteries and 3,000 monks belonging to both Mahayana and other Buddhist traditions, alongside numerous Brahmanical temples and Jain ascetics.
Xuanzang’s Great Tang Record of the Western Regions is part observation, part collected testimony and part sacred geography. Monasteries appear beside miracle-working images and stupas attributed to Ashoka. Places are measured not only by their roads and harvests but by the sermons believed to have been delivered there in earlier lives of the Buddha.
Even so, his eye for the material world is unusually sharp. Near the Pundravardhana capital, he described the great Vāśibha monastery, with lofty halls and about 700 Mahayana monks. Scholars from across eastern India gathered here, wrote Xuanzang. His descriptions confirm that Bengal in the late 630s CE was part of an interconnected academic world, in which monks, discourses and manuscripts circulated between the great institutions of ancient India.
From the north, Xuanzang travelled through Kamarupa, in present-day Assam, before turning south towards Samatata in the south-east, centred broadly on the Mainamati-Lalmai area near present-day Comilla and extending across parts of eastern Bangladesh. Here the land approached the sea. It was humid and fertile, with abundant crops, flowers and fruit, Xuanzang noted. His account lists more than 30 monasteries and about 2,000 monks, most following the Sthavira tradition, as well as temples and a substantial Jain presence.
The religious landscape he describes is strikingly plural. Buddhist monks lived alongside Brahmanical communities and Jain renunciants; rulers patronised competing institutions; philosophical disagreement was a normal feature of urban life. Xuanzang sometimes wrote about rival traditions in the polemical language of a committed Buddhist, but the density of his observations reveals coexistence as much as conflict.
West of Samatata lay Tamralipti, one of the subcontinent’s important maritime gateways. Xuanzang found a warm, prosperous place where unusual and valuable goods arrived by water and land. At Karnasuvarna, near present-day Murshidabad in West Bengal, he encountered another scholarly centre: Raktamṛttika Mahavihara, the “Red Clay” monastery. Its courtyards, houses, terraces and pavilions impressed him. Learned people assembled there, he wrote, to cultivate knowledge and morality. The name seems almost to anticipate the red-brick monastic ruins that still rise from the Bengal plain.
The pilgrim who came before
Xuanzang was not the first Chinese monk to follow the rivers of northern India towards Bengal. More than two centuries before Xuanzang, in the early fifth century, another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim named Faxian had reached Tamralipti after travelling across Central Asia and the Indian plains in search of Buddhist scriptures.
By the time he arrived at the port, Faxian had already visited many of the places associated with the Buddha’s life. At Tamralipti, usually identified with modern Tamluk in West Bengal, the long overland pilgrimage paused at the edge of the sea. Ships crowded the harbour, their hulls carrying spices, cloth, ivory and pilgrims between the Bay of Bengal and the ports of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia.
Faxian remained there for two years. He copied Buddhist sutras and made drawings of sacred images, preserving teachings and artistic forms that he hoped to carry back to China. Then, when the seasonal wind turned favourable, he boarded a large merchant vessel. His account describes the ship sailing south-west for 14 days and nights before reaching Sri Lanka.
Twenty horses and a library
Xuanzang returned to Chang’an in 645 CE. The monk who had slipped out of China in secrecy came home to a public welcome. He carried Buddhist images, relics and 657 Sanskrit manuscripts, transported, according to tradition, on a caravan of packhorses. The physical survival of the collection was itself remarkable. Manuscripts had crossed deserts, rivers and mountain passes. Some had reportedly been lost when the returning party attempted difficult river crossings.
Xuanzang declined an official career and entered a different kind of state service. With imperial support, he directed teams of linguists, monks, scribes and editors. During the remaining 19 years of his life, Xuanzang’s bureau produced translations of major works, including the Yogācārabhūmi, the Abhidharmakośa and the vast Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra. His method aimed at greater consistency and closer attention to Sanskrit terminology than had been found in many earlier translations.
Xuanzang declined an official career and entered a different kind of state service. With imperial support, he directed teams of linguists, monks, scribes and editors. During the remaining 19 years of his life, Xuanzang’s bureau produced translations of major works, including the Yogācārabhūmi, the Abhidharmakośa and the vast Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra. His method aimed at greater consistency and closer attention to Sanskrit terminology than had been found in many earlier translations. He also compiled the Cheng weishi lun, drawing together Indian commentaries on Yogacara, or “consciousness-only”, thought.
With his disciple Kuiji, Xuanzang helped establish the Faxiang school in China. In time, its vocabulary and arguments entered the wider bloodstream of East Asian Buddhism. Related traditions became known as Beopsang in Korea and Hossō in Japan.
The manuscripts therefore reshaped Chinese Buddhism in two ways. They added texts to the canon, but they also changed the standards by which a translation could claim authority. Sanskrit learning, Indian commentary and organised editorial labour acquired new prestige.
The Monkey King
Xuanzang’s historical life eventually acquired a second existence. Nearly nine centuries after his return, his pilgrimage became the framework for the Ming-era novel Journey to the West. The austere scholar was transformed into Tang Sanzang, the scripture-seeking monk protected by Sun Wukong, the rebellious Monkey King, and a company of supernatural disciples.
For millions of people, this fictional monk remains more familiar than the formidable linguist and traveller who crossed Asia. Xuanzang survives simultaneously as saint, scholar, explorer and a character in one of the world’s most enduring adventure stories.
In Xi’an, the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda recalls the translation centre and the collection brought from India; the original tower was built in 652 CE to house scriptures and religious objects associated with his journey.
In Xi’an, the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda recalls the translation centre and the collection brought from India; the original tower was built in 652 CE to house scriptures and religious objects associated with his journey.
At Nalanda, whose ruins are today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, his time there is commemorated, and his writings remain central to understanding the university's curriculum and daily life. In Bengal, historians of Mahasthangarh and the broader Pundravardhana region continue to cross-reference his descriptions against the archaeological record, using his seventh-century travel notes to help reconstruct a Bengali kingdom that left few writings of its own.
China and India have, in recent decades, invoked his journey as a touchstone of shared civilisational history—a rare figure whose memory both nations can, with some justice, claim as their own.
Zarif Faiaz is a journalist at The Daily Star. He is the editor of the Tech & Startup section and a research fellow at Tech Global Institute. Reach him at faiaz@thedailystar.net.
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