The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang - with an Introduction Containing an Account of the Works of I-Tsing

The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang is a life record written by his disciple Hwui Li, later on translated into English in the mid-nineteenth century by Samuel Beal. This book illustrates the celebrated life of a great scholar and pilgrim-traveller from his birth to his death in the year 664. The book highlights his interesting journey starting from China, covering Central Asia and finally into India.

Samuel Beal was an Oriental scholar, who translated many early Chinese texts into English.

CENTURIES BEFORE BIOGRAPHY became a business, before the peccadilloes of Royal mistresses and forgotten courtesans obtained a "market value," the writing of the Master's life by some cherished disciple was both an act of love and piety in the Far East. The very footprints of the famous dead became luminous, and their shadows shone in dark caves that once withheld them from the world. Memory looking back viewed them through a golden haze; they were merged at last in ancient sunlight; they were shafts of God rayed in the tangled forests of time. In this spirit, then, the man of compassionate feeling (such is the rendering of the Sanscrit Shama), the Shaman Hwui-li, took up his tablets and wrote the life of Hiuen- Tsiang. The Master had already written his immortal Si-yu-ki or Record of Western Countries, yet the sixteen years of that wonderful quest in far-off India, of cities seen and shrines visited, of strange peoples and stranger customs, cannot be crowded into one brief record. And so we watch the patient disciple waiting on those intervals of leisure when the task of translation from Sanscrit into Chinese is laid aside, when the long routine of a Buddhist day is ended, waiting for the impressions of a wandering soul in the birthland of its faith. The Life is supplement to the Record. What is obscure or half told in the one is made clear in the other.

I. The present volume is intended to supplement the "History of the Travels of Hiuen-Tsiang" (Si-yu-ki), already published by Messrs. Trubner in two volumes, and entitled "Buddhist Records of the Western World."

The original from which the translation is made is styled "History of the Master of the Law of the three Pitakas of the 'Great Loving-Kindness' Temple." It was written, probably in five chapters, in the first instance by Hwui-li, one of Hiuen Tsiang's disciples, and afterwards enlarged and completed in ten chapters by Yen-thsong, another of his followers.' Yen-thsong was selected by the disciples of Hwui-li to re-arrange and correct the leaves which their master had written and hidden in a cave. He added an introduction and five supplementary chapters. The five chapters added by Yen-thsong are probably those which follow the account of Hiuen-Tsiang's return from India, and relate to his work of translation in China. I have not thought it necessary to reproduce this part of the original; my object has been simply to complete the "Records" already published relating to India.

**Contents and Sample Pages**