History and Context
c.7th century CE. Xuanzang (602-664 CE, also known as Hiuen Tsang), a peripatetic Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveller, and translator, defied his Kingdom’s ban on travel abroad and came overland to India. Over 16 years (629-645 CE), his travels in India took him to Kashmir, Mathura, Ayodhya, Prayaga, Varanasi, and Nalanda among other places. At the famed Nalanda academia, he schooled with Buddhist Masters including Silabhadra. When he returned to China, he shipped 657 Sanskrit texts centred on Mahayana and Hinayana on twenty packhorses. To his surprise, Emperor Taizong welcomed him as a national hero and set up a large centre of learning in Xi’an, which became the seat of new age thinking for scholars from all over East Asia that drew on thesis of karma, rebirth, perception, and consciousness and influenced generations of thinkers across the Continent.