Faxian

Faxian (traditional Chinese: 法顯; simplified Chinese: 法显; pinyin: Fǎxiǎn; also romanized as Fa-Hien, Fa-hsien, Fa Xian, et al.) (337 – c. 424 CE) was a Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled by foot all the way from China to India, visiting many sacred Buddhist sites in what are now Xinjiang, China, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka and between 399 and 412 to acquire Buddhist scriptures. His journey is described in his important travelogue, A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Xian of his Travels in India and Ceylon in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline.

He visited India during the reign of Chandragupta II and is most known for his pilgrimage to Lumbini, the birthplace of Gautama Buddha in modern Nepal. Faxian claimed that demons and dragons were the original inhabitants of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

On Faxian's way back to China, after a two-year stay in Ceylon, a violent storm drove his ship onto an island that was probably Java. After five months there, Faxian took another ship for southern China but, again, it was blown off course and they ended up landed at Laoshan in what is now the Shandong peninsula in northern China, 30 km east of the city of Qingdao. He spent the rest of his life translating and editing the scriptures he had collected.

He also wrote a book on his travels, filled with accounts of early Buddhism, and the geography and history of numerous countries along the Silk Roads at the turn of the 5th century CE. Faxian visited India in the early fifth century AD. He is said to have walked all the way from China across icy desert and rugged mountain passes. He entered India from the north-west and reached Pataliputra. He took back with him Buddhist texts and images sacred to Buddhism.