The Project Gutenberg EBook of Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, by Fa-Hsien

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Title: Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms

Author: Fa-Hsien

Translator: James Legge

Release Date: March 28, 2006 [EBook #2124]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORD OF BUDDHISTIC KINGDOMS ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny

A RECORD OF BUDDHISTIC KINGDOMS

Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hsien of his Travels in
India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of
Discipline

Translated and annotated with a Corean recension of the Chinese text

BY

JAMES LEGGE

PREFACE

Several times during my long residence in Hong Kong I endeavoured to
read through the "Narrative of Fa-Hsien;" but though interested with
the graphic details of much of the work, its columns bristled so
constantly--now with his phonetic representations of Sanskrit words,
and now with his substitution for them of their meanings in Chinese
characters, and I was, moreover, so much occupied with my own special
labours on the Confucian Classics, that my success was far from
satisfactory. When Dr. Eitel's "Handbook for the Student of Chinese
Buddhism" appeared in 1870, the difficulty occasioned by the Sanskrit
words and names was removed, but the other difficulty remained; and I
was not able to look into the book again for several years. Nor had I
much inducement to do so in the two copies of it which I had been able
to procure, on poor paper, and printed from blocks badly cut at first,
and so worn with use as to yield books the reverse of attractive in
their appearance to the student.

In the meantime I kept studying the subject of Buddhism from various
sources; and in 1878 began to lecture, here in Oxford, on the Travels
with my Davis Chinese scholar, who was at the same time Boden Sanskrit
scholar. As we went on, I wrote out a translation in English for my
own satisfaction of nearly half the narrative. In the beginning of
last year I made Fa-Hsien again the subject of lecture, wrote out a
second translation, independent of the former, and pushed on till I
had completed the whole.

The want of a good and clear te