Benjamin Brose - Xuanzang: Chinas Legendary Pilgrim and Translator

I FIRST encountered Xuanzang in the city of Nanjing. While doing fieldwork for an unrelated project, I spent a day walking along the old city wall, skirting the southern shore of Xuanwu Lake. On the top of one forested hill stood a five-storied brick stpa with an inscription informing passersby that the tower contained a portion of the Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzangs skull. There was also a small Buddhist temple about a hundred yards away, and on the altar inside one of its halls, I saw what looked like a champagne flute half-filled with bone fragments. The monk in charge explained that these were shards of Xuanzangs parietal bone. It seemed strange that the same relics would be enshrined at two sites in such close proximity. A few years earlier, on the sprawling grounds of Yakushiji Monastery in Nara, Japan, I had visited a Xuanzang Memorial Hall that also purportedly housed a piece of Xuanzangs skull. How could one relic be in so many different places? I asked the monk at the temple in Nanjing about the relic in Nara and he dismissed it as a fake. They tried to steal our relic, he said with a twinge of pride, but we stopped them. This piqued my curiosity and I did a quick internet search the next day. To my surprise, several other sites also advertised reliquaries enshrining a portion of Xuanzangs skull. These were spread not only throughout China and Japan but also in India and Taiwan. How could this be? I started to track down relevant newspaper articles, diaries, and pamphlets. Over time, I visited as many of the sites as I could, and eventually wrote a short essay detailing the many divisions and peregrinations of Xuanzangs relics throughout Asia.

I thought that was the end of the matter but soon came across Xuanzang again. I was living in Taiwan at the time, and at a little park near downtown Taipei where my kids liked to play there was a small temple partway up a hill behind the playground. I walked up one day to take a look around and admired the dozens of statues on the altar of the main hall. The dark, unpainted wood of the central figure was draped in a miniature gold brocade robe. A serene face with downcast eyes gazed out from beneath a five-pointed crown encrusted with jewels. When I asked who this was, the caretaker identified her as the bodhisattva Nine Lotuses and explained that she was an incarnation of Xuanzang. I had never heard anything like this before. The bodhisattva Nine Lotuses is usually identified as the divinized form of a Ming Dynasty empress dowager. I did not mention my interest in Xuanzang, but the caretaker went on to tell me that the abbot of the temple, a laywoman Ill call Ms. Wang, was able to communicate with deities and was in direct and regular contact with Xuanzang.

I returned to speak with Ms. Wang a few days later, and she described how she began having visions as a child. As she grew older, a broad range of divine beings, from Buddhist bodhisattvas to Daoist immortals to Jesus Christ, gave her instructions and invested her with the powers to heal and foresee the future. Her tutelary spirit was Xuanzang. This deity, she explained, originally lived in a heavenly Buddha realm, but because his cultivation was incomplete, he was sent down to earth to perform the meritorious task of bringing Buddhist stras from India to China. Once his work was complete, Xuanzang was able to return to the Buddha realm, but out of compassion for the world, he left a portion of his spirit behind in the form of Nine Lotuses. Ms. Wang told me that the bodhisattva now works through her to protect humankind against all manner of illness and natural disasters. After assessing my facial features and interpreting the characters in my Chinese name, Ms. Wang announced that I too had the rare inborn ability to communicate with spirits but would need to study closely with her before I could manifest my potential. She suggested that we begin the following week.

I regret that I never did return to the temple, but I did start seeing Xuanzang nearly everywhere I looked in Taipei. He was in the graphic novels strewn around my local coffee shop. Men and women dressed as Xuanzang to perform in large, dramatic public funeral ceremonies and to march in local temple processions. His statue sat on the altars of some temples. He starred in TV shows, commercials, puppet performances, and movies. An ad campaign for a popular online video game featured scantily clad young women dressed as Xuanzang and holding his golden, ringed staff. The most jarring example was a shrink-wrapped processed meat product labeled Flesh of the Tang Monk on sale in supermarkets. I was fascinated by the many different ways modern people thought about this medieval monk.