Hui Chao
| Author:Laxman Burdak, IFS (R) |
Hui Chao (704–787) was a Korean Buddhist monk from Silla, one of Korea's Three Kingdoms. He is primarily remembered for his account of his travels in medieval India, the Wang Ocheonchukguk Jeon.
Variants of name
Life
Hyecho studied esoteric Buddhism in Tang China, initially under Śubhakarasiṃha and then under the famous Indian monk Vajrabodhi who praised Hyecho as "one of six living persons who were well-trained in the five sections of the Buddhist canon."
On the advice of his Indian teachers in China, he set out for India in 723 to acquaint himself with the language and culture of the land of the Buddha.
Works
During his journey of India, Hyecho wrote a travelogue in Chinese named the Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India (往五天竺國傳, Wang Ocheonchukguk Jeon).
The travelogue reveals that Hyecho, after arriving by sea in India headed to the Indian Kingdom of Magadha (present-day Bihar), then moved on to visit Kushinagar and Varanasi. However Hyecho's journey did not end there and he continued north, where he visited Lumbini (present-day Nepal), Kashmir, the Arabs.[1] Hyecho left India following the Silk Road towards the west, via Agni or Karasahr,[2] to China where the account ends in 729 CE.
He referred to three kingdoms lying to the northeast of Kashmir which were "under the suzerainty of the Tibetans…. The country is narrow and small, and the mountains and valleys very rugged. There are monasteries and monks, and the people faithfully venerate the Three Jewels. As to the kingdom of Tibet to the East, there are no monasteries at all and the Buddha's teaching is unknown; but in [these above-mentioned] countries the population consists of Hu, therefore they are believers."[3]
Rizvi goes on to point out that this passage not only confirms that in the early eighth century the region of modern Ladakh was under Tibetan suzerainty, but that the people were of non-Tibetan stock.
It took Hyecho approximately four years to complete his journey. The travelogue contains much information on local diet, languages, climate, cultures, and political situations.
It is mentioned that Hyecho witnessed the decline of Buddhism in India. He also found it quite interesting to see the cattle roaming freely around cities and villages.
The travelogue was lost for many years until a fragment of it was rediscovered by Paul Pelliot in the Mogao Caves in China in 1908 and was subsequently translated into different languages over the years. The original fragment is now in France.
See also
References
- ↑ Yang Han-sung; et al., eds. (1984), Hye Ch'o Diary: A Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five Regions of India, Fremont: Jain Publishing Co., ISBN 978-0-89581-024-3, pp. 52-58.
- ↑ Sen, Surendranath (1956), India through Chinese Eyes, Sir William Meyer Endowment Lectures, Madras: University of Madras.p. 186.
- ↑ (Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh, p. 10), Rizvi (1996), p. 56.
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