Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (41 page)

And another Indo-Greek of the same period, announcing himself as Heliodorus, Greek ambassador (
yonadūta
) from King Antialkidas, left an inscription in perfect Prakrit on a column still standing at Besnagar in Madhya Pradesh. It ends with the spiritual precept:

By contrast with Greek writers, who were in India largely as traders, conquerors or representatives of power, the Chinese came as serious students of India’s culture, and particularly Buddhism: some evidently learnt Sanskrit (with Pali and Magadhi Prakrit) in depth during their stay. Their descriptions, therefore, have an authority and penetration that far exceed the Greek testimony; in many cases, they provide the best evidence we have for the details of Indian life at this time, the Indians themselves having always been remarkably unconcerned to set down straightforward descriptions of their own daily life.

The Chinese testimony comes from four pilgrims in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures, most of whom struggled past the Taklamakan desert and across the Hindu Kush to enter India through this northern route. They came at intervals of about a century. Each of them, besides bringing home quantities of Buddhist manuscripts which they then set about translating, went on to write a memoir after their return to China.

Fa-Xian (
), the first whose tale has survived, travelled to India via the Hindu Kush from AD 400 to 414, returning by sea. For three of these years he was at Pataliputra, ‘learning to read the books in Sanskrit
^*
and to converse in that language, and in copying the precepts’.
¹⁸
(His comrade Do-Zhing was so impressed with the holy life of the Indian
śramanas
that he decided not to go home.) Fa-Xian then moved down the Ganges to another major city, Champa (near modern Bhagalpur), where he spent two more years, principally seeking to acquire Buddhist texts,
¹⁹
before an extremely eventful voyage home via ‘Ye-po-ti’ or
Yava-dvīpa
(Java). He says he had resided in central India for six years in all.
²⁰

In 518 Song-Yun (
) came. He penetrated no farther than
Nagarahāra
(Jalalabad) and
Puru
apūra
(Peshawar), at either end of the Khyber pass, which now links Afghanistan and Pakistan; and returned to China by the same route after three years.

Then, in 629, the most famous of them all, Xuan-Zang (
), reached India by stealth (the Chinese border being closed at the time), and after a three-year journey stayed for ten years, mostly as a student at
Nālandā
university outside Pataliputra, but also undertaking a journey around most of the south of the subcontinent.

Xuan-Zang was followed, a generation later, in 671, by a pilgrim called Yi-Jing (
), Yi-Jing travelled by sea from Canton, but he stopped at the Indianised kingdom of Śrī Vijaya (Palembang) in southern Sumatra for two years of Sanskrit study. (He wrote: ‘if a Chinese priest wishes to go to the west to understand and read there, he would be wise to spend a year or two in Fo-Shi [Vijaya], and practise the proper rules there; he might then go on to central India.’) He himself then proceeded to the university of Nalanda, where he studied for ten years. Afterwards, he returned by sea to Śrī Vijaya, where he spent most of his time until 695, organising the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese, and writing two memoirs:
On eminent monks who sought the law in the West
, and
On the spiritual law, sent from the Southern Seas
.
²¹

India for them was the home of Buddhist enlightenment. But it was also a fascinating country in its own right. Their accounts of their time there are very largely taken up with travelogue, but Xuan-Zang is particularly detailed about the intellectual life he encountered, and to which he contributed, during his stay. He wrote:

Strictly speaking, Manu’s contemporary conception of
Madhyadeśa
(’midland’) would, as we have seen, have excluded Magadha and the region of the lower Ganges as too far to the east. But in practice we can infer from Xuan-Zang that in his day the speech of ‘Middle India’ included the language of Pataliputra, ancient capital of several Indian empires, and of Nalanda, even then the pre-eminent university in the land.

Sanskrit first appears to us, as do most of its Indo-European sister languages, as the speech of conquering warriors, well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours, and turn them into serfs and subjects. The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction: men who fight from chariots, speak forthrightly, and care for their own personal honour more than life itself. When, in the Sanskrit epic
Mahābhārata
, Krishna advises Arjuna on his duty that day, he could be speaking to the Greek Achilles attacking Troy (a thousand years earlier), or the Irishman Cúchulainn standing against the hosts of Connacht (in a thousand years to come).