The Record of Tang Sanzang's Journey West to Attain the Way

My plain white kasaya is stained with the sands of the Ganges and the snow of Chang'an. In the creases of the palm-leaf sutra in my hand lie nine cycles of life and death. The world calls me the Buddha of Sandalwood Merit, yet no one knows I am still Jiang Liu'er, counting spiderwebs beneath the eaves of Jinshan Temple. When Emperor Taizong's finger traced the map of the Western Regions, I caught a glimpse in his pupils of the bloodied reflection of Xuanwu Gate, still wet with blood.

The journey west was never merely a trail of hoofprints. The bones of nine lifetimes beneath the Flowing Sands River were an inscription of karmic rebirth. The scraps of a burned swaddling cloth beneath the Flaming Mountains pointed to Jin Chanzi's fate of banishment. The face in the bronze mirror of the Kingdom of Women, overlapping with my mother's, revealed the delusion of attachment. When Wukong's golden headband bit into his stone-born skull, the faint sound of five hundred years of spring grass breaking through the earth beneath Five Elements Mountain pierced five centuries of loneliness. On the night Bajie got drunk at Gao Village, the stars of the fallen Milky Way revealed the broken rake of Tianpeng. The most painful place was Lingyun Crossing: the boat without a bottom carried ten lifetimes' worth of cicada shells downstream. The body called "Xuanzang" was filled with the moonlight of Jin Chanzi's rebirths.

Nineteen years of dust and hardship condensed into the bronze bells beneath the eaves of the Wild Goose Pagoda. Blood-red stains seeped through the still-damp Heart Sutra on the translation platform. As the emperor ran his hand over the palm-leaf sutra, his fingertip paused at the passage about the Kingdom of the Lions and Camels. "The true sutra isn't in Sanskrit. It's in the grains of sand seeping from the cracks in your bones." On the eve of my passing, I buried my mother's embroidered handkerchief and a lock of Wukong's severed hair in the underground palace. I suddenly realized that the eighty-one trials had never ended. When snow falls in Chang'an, the blood and tears long soaked into my kasaya will become a new plume of smoke rising over the desolate desert.

This is no record of a pilgrimage to fetch the scriptures. It is the story of an ordinary monk opening his heart to attain the Way. Moonlight shines through the old bones beneath the Flowing Sands River, revealing that every grain of sand is a relic of my own attachment. If you open these yellowed scriptures and hear a camel bell sobbing, that is Jiang Liu'er, forever eighteen in the river of time, sighing.