6 December 1999, Islamabad, overnight in Ma

Iott Guesthouse

There is a monument in Taxila with a strange name, called the International Buddhist Institute, much like a modern religious institution, which actually refers to Jaulia

The ruins of the lecture hall. Historically, this lecture hall has a very high level and there are monks from all over the world, so it is not too much to say that it is an international Buddhist college. It's on the hill and you have to climb to get there.

At first, I didn't pay much attention to it, thinking that in the early center of Buddhist culture, there would naturally be many ruins of lecture halls. But the staff of the lecture hall seemed to look at us differently, an elderly man with a brown face and a white coat, with his big tongue English that was not very clear, repeatedly said a sentence to us, and finally understood that this is where Xuanzang of the Tang Dynasty stopped!

Seeing our expressions, he was suspicious, so he led us through the dense layers of monk meditation platform, came to a larger meditation platform, squatted down, and pointed out to us a complete statue on the base, saying that this is the Buddhist descendants to commemorate Xuanzang's stop and repair, this statue is Xuanzang, is one of the two most perfect statues in the entire lecture hall.

He did not say that this meditation platform was sat by Xuanzang, but only said that it was built by later generations, which has a trustworthy honesty. He also said that Xuanzang not only stopped here, but also preached. I believe this, all Buddhist travelers travel thousands of miles, called "learning scriptures", in fact, they are searching and discussing along the way, and lectures are indispensable along the way.

I have been in this lecture hall for a long time and do not want to leave. The lecture hall is divided into two floors, which is very different from the Chinese-style temples, and is all made of mud bricks, which is extremely simple. After climbing up the hill, we first enter a crowded ground floor, surrounded by small meditation rooms, and in the middle hall there are many meditation platforms, which we can only carefully navigate through the curved passages between the meditation platforms. It can be seen that the monks sitting on the meditation platform in the middle should be a little higher in rank, and they can already move the meditation in their personal cells to the large public. The middle meditation platform is also large and small, and Xuanzang's memorial seat belongs to the largest one. There are also many broken Buddha statues on the walls of this layer, all of which belong to the Gandhara series, and there may be many reasons for the breakage, not excluding the destruction of other religions when they flourished later, but mainly because they are old and naturally weathered. Some of these Buddha statues are clay sculptures, and some are carved from local stones that are not solid, which is a material regret compared to the "big stone culture" seen in Greece and Egypt. There is no way around it, a kind of regret that starts in the two river basins.

The second level is where the real preaching is placed. There are still small rooms for meditation and listening to the scriptures, and there is a large and flat patio in the middle, where the general listeners sit on the ground. It can be seen from this that those who have a small room around should be a high monk, which is the opposite of the bottom. In the corner of the patio there was an open-roofed house, now marked "Bathhouse," and of course no one would bathe in the middle of the solemn lecture hall, which was supposed to be the place where the preachers and listeners washed their hands with clean water. Separated from the lecture hall by a wall, there is a dining room and a kitchen, where the monks sit on the ground and eat on the square stone piers, and there are still four stone piers left. The dining room is close to the cliff, and under the cliff is a river that has now dried up, and across the river are several gentle slopes, and it is said that ordinary monks from all over the country who came to listen to the lecture at that time set up a monk's dormitory on the opposite slope to rest. Our Xuanzang does not have to go up the hillside, but has been sitting on the meditation platform on the ground floor, and when there is a lecture activity, he can also have a small room upstairs, and occasionally walk to the front of the stage as a speaker in the reverent and curious eyes of everyone.

Xuanzang arrived in Gandhara about 630 A.D. or a little later, and what kind of hardships he went through to get here is something we have read about in the "Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty". Needless to say, his experience of dying in the Great Gobi Desert and reaching Gandhara from the Great Gobi to Gandhara had to at least trek over the Tengger Mountains in the Tien Shan Mountains, the Pamirs, and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, which would seem insurmountable to today's well-armed mountaineers. When he saw so many Gandhara Buddha statues, he immediately understood that he had arrived at the "Northern Tianzhu", and his happy mood could be imagined. He gave the temples the gifts he had brought along the way, such as gold, silver, and silk, and stayed for a while, and then began to make his way to the central, eastern, southern, and western parts of India. This was the place where he took a long breath of rest, and this was his first stop when he entered the holy land of Buddhism. Therefore, when I walked up and down the lecture hall repeatedly, my mind was full of his image. I guessed that his footsteps and eyes back then, and I quickly concluded that he must have thought of Fa Xian first. Fa Xian had arrived here more than 200 years earlier than Xuanzang, and the feat of this previous generation of monks has always been the driving force for Xuanzang's westward journey.

Fa Xian arrived in Gandhara in 402 AD, as can be deduced from his Chronicles of the Buddha's Kingdom. Fahin first crossed the Taklamakan Desert and then crossed the Pamirs. What is even more surprising about him than Xuanzang is that Xuanzang was thirty years old when he crossed the Pamir Plateau, while Fa Xian was already sixty-seven years old! Fa Xian was sixty-eight years old when he appeared in the kingdom of Gandhara, and this was only the starting point for his study of Buddhist culture in the Indus and Ganges valleys. After the inspection, this old man had to arrive in present-day Sri Lanka, and then go north to Indonesia by sea to return to China, when he was already 79 years old. From the age of 80, he began to translate the scriptures he brought back and wrote his travelogue "The Legend of the Buddha" until his death at the age of 86. This old man, who placed his brilliant feat in the annals of history after the age of sixty-five, is indeed the most thorough challenge to the age barrier of mankind, and also shows how much life energy can be generated by a belief.

Standing in the Gandhara ruins of Taxila, I am truly proud of the ancient Chinese Buddhist travelers. What I admire even more is that although they are Buddhists, they are also Chinese, and the historical tradition of Chinese culture has made them develop the fine habit of written records, leaving the "Records of the Buddha Kingdom" and "The Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" for history. As a result, even foreign historians admit that without these works by the Chinese, a history of Buddhism would be difficult to sort out. Even the ordinary history of India has to be filled in and revised with the help of these travelogues.

I remember when Meng Guangmei and I were sitting and chatting in front of the podium at the Sekapu ruins, she wondered why there was no information about Chinese civilization in these reliefs that blended multiple civilizations. I said that the Himalayas and the Pamirs are too high, and the sea routes are too far away, and it is true that the relationship between Chinese civilization and this area has not been seriously established in BC, but do you know how these sites were discovered? Relying on Xuanzang's "Tang Western Regions" and Fa Xian's "Buddha's Country". Although the arrival of the Chinese was a little late, the accurate written records filled in the history here, pointed out the hidden here, and resurrected the relics here, which shows that the Chinese are not absent after all.