The Big Wild Goose Pagoda has weathered all the storms. Xuanzang was the inspiration. Monks like Pu Ci defended it at whatever cost. If monasteries were destroyed, they would be rebuilt. Even without monasteries, monks like Duan could carry on the faith. Because of people like them, Buddhism has survived in China for almost two thousand years, and will continue to be an important part of Chinese life. I had received a powerful lesson right at the start of my journey: the strength of faith. This was what motivated and sustained Xuanzang. The three monks at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda were his followers. They had already given me an impression of what it was in Buddhism that made them, and Xuanzang, so different, so special. I began to understand what Grandmother had said about monks being the gentlest of men. But they were also the toughest. I began to grasp what our minds could do if we indeed could cultivate them as the Buddha said.
Clack! Clack! There was a sharp, hard sound: a monk walked past us, banging two pieces of wood together. The young monk said it was time for the evening services. Before we said goodbye, he went back to his room and returned with a little book. It had a folded paper in it. ‘This has the Heart Sutra translated by Master Xuanzang himself,’ he said. ‘It is the core of Chinese Buddhism. Whenever Xuanzang was in trouble, he always recited it. Please use it as your guide too. It won’t be easy, but keep going. And when you begin to understand this sutra, you will be getting somewhere. I hope you will find the way.’
Late that night, I went back through the city gates, and headed for the station, catching a late-night train for the next stage of my journey, the Jade Gate, the frontier of the Chinese empire in Xuanzang’s time. After I had settled down in my hard-sleeper booth, I took out the monk’s little book. I opened the folded paper first and found myself face to face with Xuanzang: young, energetic and purposeful, his eyes firmly on the road ahead and his backpack full of scriptures – it was a rubbing of Xuanzang’s portrait from a stele in the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. But his gifts felt heavy in my hands. Perhaps I should not just make the journey for myself. I should try to help bring the real Xuanzang back for my fellow-Chinese, just as the abbot and monks of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda are doing. It would be like restoring a part of our heritage.
IT WAS AUGUST 627. The great Western Gate of Chang’an closed at nightfall. On the drum tower, the watchman was ready to strike the hour. The streets were emptying. Traders in the Western Market were putting up their shutters and seductive attendants were waiting outside taverns to lure them in. Among the throng of people leaving the capital were Xuanzang and another monk, clad in long robes. They had all their belongings wrapped in cloths slung over their shoulders. They walked briskly, with their heads down, trying to avoid the gaze of the officials, who were checking travellers’ passes at random.
Once on the road, Xuanzang took a last look back at Chang’an in the twilight. He was excited; his dream of going to the land of the Buddha was beginning to come true. He had failed to get permission to travel and was leaving in defiance of the emperor’s edict, but that could not dampen his spirits. He felt free. How he wished he could fly like a bird to India. But he would have to make his way laboriously, on foot or on horseback, along all the thousands of miles lying ahead.
As the train pulled out of Xian station in the middle of the night, I was excited too. This was the start of my journey in his footsteps. I could have flown, but I liked the pace of the train – I could not walk as he did but at least I would see what he saw. The rhythmical rattling of the wheels sounded a bit like footsteps, though the train did in one hour what took him two days or so. Still, 1,400 years apart, we were on the same highway, the famous Silk Road.
Xuanzang would have known the Silk Road well. It acquired the name in the late nineteenth century, long after its demise, from the German scholar Ferdinand von Richthofen, but its history usually begins with the mission of Zhang Qian in 139 BC, almost seven hundred years before Xuanzang. Zhang, an official in the Chinese court of the Han dynasty, was assigned to seek an alliance in Central Asia to fight against the foremost threat to China, the marauding Huns. He was captured and imprisoned by the enemy, but he never forgot his mission, and managed to escape after thirteen years in captivity. His report and the tale of his adventures inspired the emperor. Before long, watchtowers were built and manned along the way within the Chinese empire. Sogdian merchants began braving the arduous journey to China regularly, trading the most treasured and valuable commodity: silk.
The ancient world, the Romans in particular, could not get enough silk, alluring to the eye and delicate to the touch. They spent colossal sums on it – it was half of their imports. The Emperor Tiberius was so worried that he tried to ban people from wearing it – the Romans would have nothing of that. But they would not have minded paying less for the fabric, which was said to cost as much as gold by the time it travelled the whole length of the Silk Road. Agents were sent out, trying to reach directly the distant land that they called Sere, from which came sericus, silken, but they never made it. Although the Chinese were willing to sell silk to the barbarians, they did not want to relinquish the secret of how it was made. Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote: ‘The Seres are famous for the wool of their forests. They remove the down from leaves with the help of water and weave it into silk.’ As late as the mid-sixth century AD, the Romans believed his account.
The Silk Road was not a single road but many, stretching from Chang’an, across the Taklamakan Desert, over the Pamir Mountains, through the grasslands of Central Asia, into Persia and then to the Mediterranean, with spurs into the northern Eurasian steppes and India. Over 5,000 miles long, it traversed some of the most inhospitable terrain, and linked up some of the greatest empires in the ancient world: Rome, Persia, India and China. This was where Xuanzang’s journey would lie.
When the day broke and the sun came into my compartment, I saw ranges of mountains, brown and dusty, with terraced fields stepping up them. Walnut and persimmon trees, laden with their fruit, stood here and there in clusters, sheltering old brick houses, their chimneys smoking as people cooked the morning meal. When we left the villages behind, the farmers walking on the windy mountain paths made me think of the Silk Road again.
The Silk Road no longer exists, and most Chinese have forgotten it, although every one of us is familiar with silk. Even I had raised silkworms as pets. One winter, Grandmother came back from a visit to her village and brought us apples, peanuts, chestnuts and a small bag of strange, fluffy white balls – silk cocoons. She said if we looked after them very carefully, putting them in a clean place not too hot, not too cold, and making sure insects would not bite them, we would have butterflies and then silkworms when the spring came.
I put my cocoons in a shoe box next to my pillow and examined them every day. They looked dry and dead. How could butterflies ever come out of them? Grandmother said not to worry, they were only sleeping and would wake up soon. I waited as eagerly as I did for the Chinese New Year. One day when I came back from school, the cocoons were open and there were some white moths. I was fascinated but disappointed; they were quite ugly, not at all pretty like butterflies. Grandmother said I should just wait. And then very soon the moths dropped tiny white blobs on the bottom of the shoe box