Xuanzang's Silk Road journey

Re-reading The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang after coming back from Nepal and India last November felt a bit different for me. It wasn’t just history anymore. Some of the places had already been treaded by my feet.

The journey of Xuanzang is usually told as something vast and almost unreal. Sixteen years of deserts, mountains, bandits, kings and monasteries. But when I’ve been to places like Lumbini or walked through the ruins of Nalanda University, it shrinks a little not in importance, but in distance. I start to see that this wasn’t some abstract pilgrimage. It happened on real ground, the same ground that I’ve just been on.

Wriggins made a good job of making that connection. She took Xuanzang’s old records and lined them up with the modern map, so I could follow him step by step. And when he moved through Kapilavastu into Lumbini, it suddenly felt familiar. When I was there, the place had this quiet serenity about it. Xuanzang saw something similar, though in his time many monasteries were already in decline, half-abandoned and fading. 

From Lumbini, he went on to the other key sites, places that now formed the standard Buddhist circuit. Sarnath, Nalanda and eventually Bodh Gaya. When I visited Nalanda, what struck me was the scale of the ruins. I had walked along those long brick foundations and tried to imagine thousands of monks living and studying there. Xuanzang didn’t have to imagine it. He saw it at its peak, with thousands of scholars in residence, studying everything from logic to language to philosophy. 

What I also realised after my trip, was how observant he was. He wasn’t just ticking off holy sites. He was noticing details, how many monasteries were active, how many were abandoned, what people believed, how they lived. Even his route through what is now southern Nepal, into northern India, matched quite closely with what we now called the Buddhist pilgrimage trail. He wasn’t following a guidebook. In a way, he was writing the first one.

And then there’s Nalanda again, which kept coming back as the centre theme of his story. Not just a stop, but a place where he stayed, studied, argued and learned. We can stand there today among the ruins and still get a faint sense of that intellectual energy. It’s not hard to imagine why he remained there for years, working under Silabhadra and going deep into the texts he had come all that way to find.

What I found myself thinking, re-reading Wriggins after the trip, was how much of Xuanzang’s journey was about persistence more than anything else. The distances were one thing but even at the key sites, he was often arriving at places already in decline, trying to piece together what remained. It was not so different from what we saw today. The stones are still there, the outlines are still there, but I have to do a bit of work to imagine the rest.

By the time he made it back to China with his load of texts, the journey had already done its real work. Not just collecting manuscripts, but connecting places, ideas, traditions. Reading about it after having been to some of those places myself, it no longer felt like a distant legend. Everything felt real and almost within reach.

And that, I think, is what Wriggins got right. She brought Xuanzang down from the pedestal a bit, not to diminish him, but to place him back on the road. The same road that still runs through Lumbini, Nalanda, Bodh Gaya and the rest.

To read about my experience on the Buddhist trail last year, click here.