The story of the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang
(in older writings spelled Hsuan-tsang, Yuan Chwang, Hiuen Tsiang,
and other ways), who made a sixteen-year pilgrimage to the India of the
great King Harsha in order to learn about Buddhist teachings at the
source, is one of the great sagas in human history. It illuminates a
phase of cultural interchange that had the most profound effect on the
maturing of Chinese civilization. It is also a chapter in the larger his-
tory of Mahayana Buddhism, depicting its transmission via China
through East and Inner Asia. Most immediately, as we encounter
Xuanzang here, we learn about Buddhist belief and its concrete expres-
sion in the lives of this monk-pilgrim and the people he encountered in
China and along the way in Central Asia and India. As such, it is a
warmly human account of a remarkable personality, brought to life
with sympathy and narrative skill. Xuanzang's story touches the
reader, as it has touched the life of the author, Sally Hovey Wriggins, a
person who, although not committed to Buddhist belief in any specific
sense, nonetheless has been deeply stirred to understand the in-
escapable attraction of this great personality. All this is deftly and
memorably communicated to the reader; the book is an important
achievement.

Several aspects of Wriggins's technique in writing this book deserve
special mention. One is that she has assembled a striking portfolio of
illustrations, ranging from photos taken on the ground by herself and
others to maps and photos of major works of art and architecture, all
linked directly to her narrative. Another is her imaginative use of ob-
servations on the scenes in China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and
India as she followed the route of Xuanzang's travels; by describing for
the reader the features of the life and of the physical setting that made
the most vivid impressions on her, she re-creates what Xuanzang had
seen in those places fourteen hundred years ago. Often they are seem-
ingly insignificant vignettes of ordinary life. She uses them to remind
the reader of the human dimensions of her subject's truly heroic un-
dertaking.

As she takes the reader into that intimate encounter with the set-
ting, she also has drawn very intelligently on the relevant secondary
scholarship, thus introducing the reader to the state of the field and to

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