the importance that scholars have always seen in the story. She has
not, to be sure, pursued all the scholarly details exhaustively or ex-
haustingly, in the manner of a specialist's monograph. Instead, in this
charmingly accessible book, she has drawn on the best of the literature
to remind us of the essential points of fact and interpretation, in the
mode of the best popular scholarly writing. I find her way of meeting
her responsibilities to her predecessors in the field very satisfying. In
fact, however, her predecessors did not give us a fully rounded picture
of Xuanzang; the image of the Prince of Pilgrims that we gain from
these pages bears us to a new level of that understanding and apprecia-
tion.

When we meet a figure of such immense personal achievement, and
hence of importance to a phase of human cultural history, we may well
ask how history would be different had he not lived. Although history
is about "what really happened," asking such a nonhistorical question
can help us to appreciate better what really happened. Without Xuan-
zang, Buddhism of some kind would nonetheless have come to play a
central role in Chinese civilization. That cannot be doubted, for the
process of full-scale adaptation to the Indian religion was long under
way in China by the time of Xuanzang's birth about 596 of the com-
mon era. He was born a little more than twenty years before the found-
ing of the glorious Tang dynasty ( 618-907 C.E.), during which Bud-
dhism reached the height of its flowering in China. When the dynasty
was founded, Buddhism had already been present on Chinese soil for
six centuries, and from its beginnings there as a religion of the com-
mon people, often confused with its native Chinese counterpart, popu-
lar Daoism, it had gradually come to be recognized as a great system of
religion and thought that had originated a thousand years earlier in
northern India.

Over several centuries other Chinese had preceded Xuanzang to
India or into Indian-dominated areas of Central Asia and maritime
Southeast Asia, going as pilgrim monks who were seeking direct
knowledge of the Buddha's teachings. Many Indians and others from
those regions had come to China, bringing texts and knowledge of reli-
gious practice, to introduce them to the Chinese. Chinese and other
merchants traveling the trade routes between eastern and western or
southern Asia, especially those who followed the various sources of
the Silk Road overland from northwest China into northern India, had
become ardent Buddhists. They had long patronized the growing insti-
tutions, the temples, shrines, and monasteries, that sustained the reli-
gious community. The young Xuanzang could conceive of the notion
of traveling to the source because so much had already been accom-
plished in making the Buddha's truths known within the sphere of
Chinese life.

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