Walk Faxian's pilgrimage, Chang'an to Ceylon and home
A Chinese monk in his sixties sets out for India to find the books his monastery was missing. Your everyday steps follow him across deserts and mountains, and his own record unlocks where he wrote it.
- 10,128 miles
- 11 stops
- Faxian, c. 416
Fifteen years for a set of books
A Chinese monk leaves Chang'an at about sixty to recover Buddhist texts unavailable at home. Fifteen years of deserts, mountain passes, monasteries and sea voyages carry Faxian from China through India and Ceylon before a storm-driven return to the coast.
In 399 AD the monk Faxian left Chang'an, today's Xi'an, because the rules for Buddhist monastic life available in China were incomplete. He crossed the desert beyond Dunhuang, went through the oasis kingdom of Khotan and over the mountains into northern India, and spent years at the great Buddhist centres of the Ganges plain, copying texts.
He sailed on to Ceylon, stayed about two years, and then came home by sea, where a storm drove his ship so far off course that he landed on the wrong stretch of the Chinese coast. His account is one of the earliest first-hand descriptions of India by a traveller from China. James Legge's translation dates from 1886. The 10,128 miles are measured across the route, since Faxian gives no single total.
- Distance
- 10,128 miles (16,300 km)
- Stops
- 11, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Faxian, translated by James Legge; Project Gutenberg ebook #2124
Where it starts
Fâ-Hien had been living in Ch'ang-gan. Deploring the mutilated and imperfect state of the collection of the Books of Discipline, in the second year of the period Hwang-che, being the Ke-hâe year of the cycle, he entered into an engagement with Hwuy-king, Tâo-ching, Hwuy-ying, and Hwuy-wei, that they should go to India and seek for the Disciplinary Rules.
A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, Chapter I · translated by James Legge
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 10 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Faxian's pilgrimage take you?
Faxian was away for about fifteen years. Choose a month or a season instead and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
11 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for India.
10,128 miles of A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, on the walks you already take.
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