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Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. When this is to be held, the king requests the presence of the sramans from all quarters of his kingdom. They come as if in clouds; and when they are all assembled, their place of session is grandly decorated.
Silken streamers and canopies are hung out in it, and waterlilies in gold and silver are made and fixed up behind the places where the chief of them are to sit. When clean mats have been spread, and they are all seated, the king and his ministers present their offerings according to rule and law. The assembly takes place in the first, second, or third month, for the most part in the spring.
After the king has held the assembly, he further exhorts the ministers to make other and special offerings. The doing of this extends over one, two, three, five, or even seven days; and when all is finished, he takes his own riding-horse, saddles, bridles, and waits on him himself, while he makes the noblest and most important minister of the kingdom mount him.
Then, taking fine white woollen cloth, all sorts of precious things, and articles which the sramans require, he distributes them among them, uttering vows at the same time along with all his ministers; and when this distribution has taken place, he again redeems whatever he wishes from the monks.
The country, being among the hills and cold, does not produce the other cereals, and only the wheat gets ripe. After the monks have received their annual portion of this , the mornings suddenly show the hoar-frost, and on this account the king always begs the monks to make the wheat ripen before they receive their portion.
There is in the country a spittoon which belonged to Buddha, made of stone, and in colour like his alms-bowl. There is also a tooth of Buddha, for the people have reared a tope, connected with which there are more than a thousand monks and their disciples, all students of the Hinayana. To the east of these hills the dress of the common people is of coarse materials, as in our country of Ts-in, but here also there were among them the differences of fine woollen cloth and of serge or haircloth.
The rules observed by the sramans are remarkable, and too numerous to be mentioned in detail. The country is in the midst of the Onion range. As you go forward from these mountains, the plants, trees, and fruits are all different from those of the land of Han, excepting only the bamboo, pomegranate, and sugar-cane.
From this the travellers went westwards towards North India, and after being on the way for a month, they succeeded in getting across and through the range of the Onion mountains. The snow rests on them both winter and summer. There are also among them venomous dragons, which, when provoked, spit forth poisonous winds, and cause showers of snow and storms of sand and gravel. Not one in ten thousand of those who encounter these dangers escapes with his life.
The people of the country call the range by the name of 'The Snow mountains. In this kingdom there was formerly an Arhat [a disciple of the Buddha who has attained nirvana], who by his supernatural power took a clever artificer up to the Tushita heaven [where bodhisattvas are reborn before appearing on earth as buddhas], to see the height, complexion, and appearance of Maitreya Bodhisattva [the "Buddha of the Future"], and then return and make an image of him in wood.
First and last, this was done three times, and then the image was completed, eighty cubits in height, and eight cubits at the base from knee to knee of the crossed legs. On fast-days it emits an effulgent light. The kings of the surrounding countries vie with one another in presenting offerings to it.
Here it is--to be seen now as of old. The travellers went on to the south-west for fifteen days at the foot of the mountains, and following the course of their range. The way was difficult and rugged, running along a bank exceedingly precipitous which rose up there, a hill-like wall of rock, 10, cubits from the base.
When one approached the edge of it, his eyes became unsteady; and if he wished to go forward in the same direction, there was no place on which he could place his foot; and beneath were the waters of the river called the Indus. In former times men had chiselled paths along the rocks, and distributed ladders on the face of them, to the number altogether of , at the bottom of which there was a suspension bridge of ropes, by which the river was crossed, its banks being there eighty paces apart.
The monks asked Fa-hien if it could be known when the Law of Buddha first went to the east. He replied, 'When I asked the people of those countries about it, they all said that it had been handed down by their fathers from of old that, after the setting up of the image of Maitreya Bodhisattva, there were sramans of India who crossed this river, carrying with them sutras and Books of Discipline. Now the image was set up rather more than years after the nirvana of Buddha, which may be referred to the reign of king P'ing of the Chow dynasty.
According to this account we may say that the diffusion of our great doctrines in the east began from the setting up of this image. If it had not been through that Maitreya, the great spiritual master who is to be the successor of the Sakya, who could have caused the "Three Precious Ones" [the precious Buddha, the precious Law, and the precious Monkhood] to be proclaimed so far, and the people of those border lands to know our Law? We know of a truth that the opening of the way for such a mystertous propagation is not the work of man; and so the dream of the emperor Ming of Han had its proper cause.
After crossing the river, the travellers immediately came to the kingdom of Woo-chang [Udyana, north of the Punjab--i. For instance, "the second Fa-hsien, Herbert Allen Giles. Fa-hsien Chinese Buddhist pilgrim through whose efforts many important Buddhist texts entered China. Fa-hsien The first Buddhist pilgrim who has left an account of his travels was the monk Fa-hsien.
Fa-hsien was a native of Shansi; he left home at three An Encyclopedia Jennifer Speake. Lesser Snow Mountain, where Hui-ching, one of the three members of the party, died. Fa-Hsien traveled on to Lakki, where he passed the summer retreat in , after which he went on to Mathura via Harana Jennifer Speake, The first pilgrim to gain fame by leaving an account of his extensive travels in the oasis region, India, and South-East Asia was Fa-hsien.
Leaving Ch'ang-an in , when he was over sixty years of age, he was to visit Kucha, Khotan, Kashgar, Jacques Gernet, Today, it has a standardized length of meters, but in the past there was no such standardization so it is difficult to know. As late as the s, the effort required to traverse the land could impact what was considered to be 1 le. The character for le is a combination of the characters for field and earth, since it was considered to be roughly the length of a village.
While traveling on the southern arm of the Silk Road, Fa-hsien stayed for three months in the Kingdom of Khotan.
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