A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms

The record of personal observations gathered by the Chinese priest Fa-hien during the travels he made at the beginning of the fifth century in Central Asia, the Punjab, India, Ceylon and thence back by sea to China, were repeatedly published, apparently under different titles, in the course of the fifth and following centuries and when the Buddhist canon was authoritatively fixed by the Sung dynasty, this record was included in the Tripitaka with the sanction of the Sung and subsequently the King dynasties. Both the Corean and Japanese editions of the Buddhist Tripitaka also include Fa-hien’s Record among the canonical writings of Northern Buddhism. The text suffered, in the course of time, slight corruptions, but the differences existing between the secular editions, as contained in various Confucian cyclopedias, and the canonical editions of the Buddhist churches of China, Corea and Japan, are very small. Dr. Legge was, so far as we know, the first translator of this work who took pains to collate the principal existing recensions of the Chinese text, and he has now produced, on the basis of the Corean edition, a text which may be considered as critically established.