Impressed by Xuanzang’s determination and fearlessness, the officer decided to help the pilgrim. Xuanzang stayed with him for the night and began his journey with a good supply of food, water and fodder for his horse. He was given an introduction for the fourth watchtower, but was warned against the fifth because the officer there had no sympathy for Buddhism. Instead, he should head for the Wild Horse Spring sixty miles to the west of it, and from there all paths would be clear. But with no experience of travelling in the desert, Xuanzang soon got lost. To add to his grief, his water bag slipped from his hand as he lifted it to drink. In an instant, his whole supply of water vanished into the sand. In total confusion and despair, he turned back and started retracing his footprints. But after a few miles he stopped. He remembered his vow: ‘Never take one step back towards China before reaching India.’
I had to keep going westwards too. I could resume my train journey from the Willow Station, and asked the driver to take me back there. When I looked out of the train window I saw nothing apart from the cloudless blue sky, a few lonely white aspens along the railway line, and a vast expanse of sand and gravel, grey, featureless; craggy mountains hemmed a distant horizon, topped with snow, but they looked impossibly aloof. Crossing the Gobi Desert even on a modern train is forbidding. I found it incredible that Xuanzang had journeyed through it alone, with no guide but his own shadow and his faith. I talked to the young man opposite me and told him about Xuanzang’s adventure in the Gobi.
‘I thought the emperor had all sorts of arrangements made for him. It says so in The Monkey King.’
‘That is fiction,’ I said.
‘I know the monkey is a fictional creation. But Xuanzang must have had a lot of protection and companions. You aren’t telling me he did it all on his own.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘You remember what happened to the famous scientist who disappeared in the desert in the 1980s? He even had satellite communication. But he never came back. Such a waste of a life.’
Xuanzang almost suffered the same fate. For four days he was lost in the Gobi, without a single drop of water. The burning heat and the punishing winds brought him to the verge of collapse. On the fifth day he fell on the sand, unable to take a single step further. His horse fell too. All he had strength for was to mutter a few prayers. He desperately turned to Guanyin: ‘In venturing on this journey, I do not seek riches, worldly profit or fame; my heart longs to find the true Law. Your heart, O Bodhisattva, forever yearns to deliver all creatures from misery. I am in such danger. Can you not hear my prayers?’
This was the worst moment in his entire journey. He was young, only twenty-seven, and had never faced the real dangers of life and death. He was determined and thought he was prepared, but he had not expected so much hardship so soon, before even leaving China. The emperor and nature itself had joined forces to put an end to his journey almost before it had begun. He was alone; he was lost; and he was dying. He remembered a sutra with the story of Guanyin saving a merchant who had been shipwrecked in the open sea for seven days. But his favourite Bodhisattva seemed to be ignoring his plea for help, although he prayed all the time to her. Was she really up there somewhere? If so, why would she not come to rescue him? The vast desert looked ready to swallow him up; death could be hours or minutes away. He would become just another pile of bones in the sand.
After praying to Guanyin, Xuanzang began to recite the Heart Sutra. He had learned it many years before from a sick man he had tended. It is the shortest sutra in the Buddhist canon but is regarded as the essence of Chinese Buddhism. He was told to recite it when he was in danger and when everything else had failed. Now he needed it more than ever. When he approached the end, these were the words he would have spoken to himself: ‘The world is ultimately empty. The wisdom of the Bodhisattva is such that he has no illusions in his mind, hence, no fear.’
The Buddha taught that having no illusions means seeing things as they really are, which in turn means recognizing the impermanence of everything. The Buddha often told his disciples that life is only a single breath. It is momentary, changing every second, and in one continuum with death. And for a Buddhist death is not an end, just a point between this world and the next. One will be reborn – though in what form depends on one’s karma. Xuanzang could hope that he would still be able to carry on his mission in his next life.
So he calmed himself. His panic was behind him, and he could think about what to do next. He picked himself up, and pulled hard on the horse’s reins. To his amazement, the old roan staggered up and set off. They struggled for nearly four miles when suddenly the horse turned in a different direction, and no matter how hard Xuanzang tried, he could not make it change its path. He let himself be guided by the creature’s instinct. Before long he saw green grass a little way off, and a shining pool, bright as a mirror. He was saved. Old horses indeed know the way.
In the Gobi, Xuanzang had passed the ultimate test. In this contest between nature and will, he triumphed over his anxiety, fear and despair. It had nearly cost him his life, but it gave him confidence. From then on, he felt there was nothing he could not face. I could hardly believe the story, and when I told it to the young man sitting opposite me, he could not believe it either. He thought I was pulling the wool over his eyes, or telling him an episode from the story of The Monkey King.
From the Wild Horse Spring, Xuanzang and his horse drank long and deep. Then they followed the beaten track. After two days he was out of the Gobi, and outside China. He was now in the Western Region, a vast territory between the Jade Gate and the Pamir Mountains, consisting mainly of the Taklamakan Desert, the second biggest in the world, with a string of independent oasis city-states along its edge, all depending on the Silk Road for their survival and wealth. Xuanzang would have known the history of the region well. China took it in the first century BC after the Silk Road was opened, but lost it to various nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes. At the point at which Xuanzang arrived, the Turks were the overlords, but the Chinese wanted it back.
Today the area is called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The Uighurs were a nomadic tribe of Turkic origin, who migrated from the Eurasian steppes to the Taklamakan in the ninth century AD, not long after Xuanzang passed through the region. It was the Uighurs who have left us some of the most splendid Buddhist art, Nestorian Christian artefacts, and rare Manichaean documents and paintings. Eventually they took to Islam with the same zeal as they had embraced other religions of the Silk Road. Highly mobile with their versatile and speedy horses, they were one of the biggest threats to China on its northern and northwestern borders. But unlike many other powerful nomadic peoples, the Uighurs never managed to rule China. In the eighteenth century, after the longest military campaign in Chinese history, the region finally became part of the empire again.
Turfan is one of the biggest oases and cities in Xinjiang, situated on the eastern edge of the Taklamakan. A guide from a travel agency would meet me at the station. ‘How will I recognize you?’ I asked him on the phone after I had told him what I wanted to see in Turfan. ‘I’m fat, like a laughing Buddha outside a temple. People call me Fat Ma.’ The description was accurate. At the exit of my compartment, I spotted him immediately. He was dressed in a t-shirt and wiping sweat from his face. We looked at each other and smiled.
‘You need some rest in the hotel?’ he asked, taking my rucksack from me. ‘You said you’re interested in history and what Xuanzang did in Turfan. You’re in for a big treat. Anyway you can make your mind up later, we are still fifty miles from the city.’ While we walked to his car I mentioned the oddness of the location of the station, both here and in Anxi. ‘Perhaps they could only build straight lines in those days,’ he laughed, and then added more seriously: ‘We did so many crazy things back then. I wouldn’t be surprised if the decision where to put the stations was completely random.’
In five minutes his battered Beijing jeep was out of the station and driving at 100 kph on a tar road as soft as melting butter. It was