Hiuen Tsang and Harsha: Religion, the Kannauj and Prayag Assemblies

Hiuen Tsang and Harsha: Four Linked Subjects and Key Dates

Harsha's Faith, the Assemblies, Xuanzang and Bana

Four subjects belong together in the study of Harsha's age. The first is the faith and religious policy of Harsha. The second is the pair of great assemblies, one at Kannauj and one at Prayag. The third is Xuanzang himself, with his years at Nalanda and the strengths and limits of his record. The fourth is the other main source for the reign, the Harshacharita of Banabhatta, which is read beside Xuanzang's account and tested against it.

Key Dates: Faxian, Harsha, Xuanzang and Yijing

The dates below place every later fact on one line, from Faxian's visit in the Gupta age to Yijing's years at Nalanda.

• Early fifth century: Faxian travels in the Gupta age, two centuries before Xuanzang.
• 606 CE: Harsha comes to the throne at Kannauj.
• 630 to 644: Xuanzang travels in India, and Nalanda is his base for the study years.
• 645: Xuanzang reaches the Tang capital Chang'an on his return; the Records of the Western Regions is compiled in 646.
• 647: Harsha dies, and the Tripartite Struggle for Kannauj follows in the eighth and ninth centuries.
• 671 to 695: Yijing leaves China, spends ten years at Nalanda and returns by the sea route.

A date note: NCERT gives 630 to 644 for Xuanzang's travel in India and 17 years for the whole journey from China, while other accounts begin his journey in 627 or 629, end it in 645, and so count 16 to 19 years. Every account places him in India in the first half of the seventh century, during Harsha's reign.

Harsha's Religious Policy: A Shaiva King Who Patronised Buddhism

The Shaiva Household and the Evidence of Seals and Grants

Harsha's own documents show a king who worshipped Shiva and came from a family with more than one faith. His seals name his ancestors as worshippers of the sun god Surya, his elder brother Rajyavardhana as a Buddhist, and Harsha himself as a Shaivite. His land-grant inscriptions describe him as Parama-maheshvara, a supreme devotee of Shiva, and his court poet Bana also calls him a Shaivite.

The inscriptions therefore show Harsha as a devotee of Shiva, while other sources show him deeply attached to Buddhism and respectful towards every school of thought. The family had a Shaiva tradition behind it as well. The legend in the Harshacharita makes the dynasty's founder Pushyabhuti a devotee of Shiva, although that founder is a figure of Bana's story and appears in no inscription. Xuanzang adds a physical detail from Kannauj. Next to a Surya temple of blue stone stood a Mahesvara (Shiva) temple of the same stone, both richly carved.

Patronage of Buddhism in Xuanzang's Account

Xuanzang describes Harsha as a devout Buddhist, and his list of the king's works is long. Harsha banned the killing of animals for food, built monasteries at places the Buddha had visited, and put up several thousand stupas, each a hundred feet high, on the banks of the Ganga. He also built well-kept hospices on the highways for travellers and the poor, and held an annual assembly of scholars to whom he gave alms.

Harsha's own writing leans the same way. His play Nagananda tells the story of the Bodhisattva Jimutavahana, and its opening verse is addressed to the Buddha, shown at the moment of defeating Mara. Yet the same play gives the goddess Gauri, the consort of Shiva, a key part in bringing its hero back to life. The royal house of the age could hold the Buddha and Shiva in one frame without any sense of contradiction.

Harsha also gave steady support to Nalanda, the great Buddhist centre that the Palas later continued to patronise, and a seal of his ally Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa was found at the site. The Nalanda section below gives the details of the grant.

Mahayana and Hinayana in Xuanzang's Record

The Mahayana, the "Great Vehicle", is the branch of Buddhism that stresses the ideal of the bodhisattva, a being who seeks buddhahood for the sake of all living beings. It developed in India from about the first century BCE, and its large teaching centres, Nalanda and Vikramashila among them, flourished between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Xuanzang studied inside this tradition, but his travels also showed him the older schools that Mahayana writers called Hinayana.

He found both traditions in different places. At Kapishi he saw more than six thousand monks, mostly Mahayana. At Kuchi, on the Central Asian road, over a hundred monasteries followed the Sarvastivada school of Hinayana Buddhism. At Kannauj the Buddhists studied both Mahayana and Hinayana teachings. He records eighteen sects of Buddhism that debated their views "as vehemently as crashing waves" even though they shared the same goal. This picture of a divided but lively Buddhist world explains why a king like Harsha could host a large assembly of monks and still be said to favour no single school.

Tolerance as Policy: Reading the Evidence Carefully

The two sets of evidence do not point in the same direction. If Xuanzang alone is read, Harsha appears a Buddhist king. If the inscriptions and Bana alone are read, he appears a Shaiva. Some scholars, such as S. R. Goyal and S. V. Sohoni, argue that Harsha remained personally a Shaiva and that his generosity to Buddhist monks misled the pilgrim into presenting him as a Buddhist. The more common reading is that any move towards Buddhism came late in life, if it came at all, and that even Xuanzang records the king's patronage of scholars of all religions and not of Buddhist monks alone.

The sound conclusion for an answer is that Harsha followed a policy of tolerance and balance. He gave to Buddhists, Brahmins and the poor, honoured the sun, Shiva and the Buddha, and did not persecute any group. He should not be called a narrow convert to Mahayana, and he should not be called hostile to Buddhism either.

Religious Life in Harsha's Realm and Beyond

Xuanzang's pages show that Buddhism was strong in some regions and thin in others, and Harsha's realm held several faiths side by side. The table gathers the places that matter for the examination.

The pattern is one of mixture and not of a single dominant faith. Buddhism was strongest in Magadha and weak in Thanesar, temples of Hindu gods stood in every region Xuanzang describes, and Jain communities remained visible in the south.

The Kannauj Assembly and the Prayag Assembly

The Kannauj Assembly in Xuanzang's Honour

The Kannauj assembly was a great religious gathering that Harsha held at his capital in honour of the Chinese pilgrim. Kings and leaders of many religious sects attended it, and Xuanzang described Kannauj as a beautiful and prosperous city and Harsha as a just and energetic ruler who kept a vast army and was often on campaign.

Xuanzang describes a religious festival of twenty-one days at Kannauj, during which Harsha and his subordinate kings performed daily rituals before a life-sized golden statue of the Buddha. Kamarupa's king Bhaskaravarman, Harsha's ally, was among the rulers present, and the audience included Buddhist monks, Hindus and Jains.

The Prayag Assembly: Giving Every Five Years

The Prayag assembly, also called the Moksha assembly, was a gathering held at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna at Prayag, today's Prayagraj. Harsha held it every five years, and after performing sacred rites he gave away much wealth, offering it to Buddhists, Brahmins and the poor. Xuanzang calls the ground where it was held the Grand Place of Almsgiving, a wide sandy area east of the city where the two rivers meet and where wealthy people and kings came to give alms.

The scale of the giving is what the pilgrim stresses. Harsha distributed the wealth he had accumulated in the years between one assembly and the next, and the act was both a religious offering and a public display of royal generosity. The recipients were drawn from several communities, which is why the assembly is cited as proof of the king's even-handed patronage and not of a Buddhist preference.

Kannauj and Prayag Compared

The current NCERT textbooks print no year for the assemblies; the official history of Kannauj district places Hiuen Tsang's visit to Kannauj in 643 CE. The order and the features of each assembly matter more than the year.

The two assemblies show a ruler who used religion as part of kingship. A king who gathers rulers of many regions at his capital, and who spends his accumulated wealth in one act of giving, is claiming a position above his rivals. The assemblies also show Harsha as a patron who could host a Buddhist pilgrim at Kannauj and give to Brahmins at Prayag within the same reign, with no sense of contradiction.

Xuanzang's Journey and the Records of the Western Regions

Why Hiuen Tsang Came to India and Where He Went

Hiuen Tsang came to India for the same reason as Faxian before him. He wished to visit the sacred Buddhist sites, study with Indian teachers and collect Sanskrit manuscripts, because the Chinese translations of his day were incomplete and sometimes contradicted each other. He left Tang China in defiance of his country's ban on foreign travel, crossed Central Asia along the Silk Road through Turfan, Kuchi and Bamiyan, and entered India from the north-west.

In India he travelled widely. He visited Kashmir, Taxila, Mathura, Kannauj, Ayodhya and Prayag, then the Buddha's holy places at Lumbini, Sarnath and Bodh Gaya, and reached Nalanda in Magadha. From there he went east to Bengal and Kamarupa, south to Andhra and Kanchipuram, and west to Nashik, Ajanta and Malwa before returning to Nalanda and then to Kannauj. The route forms a great loop through the Buddhist holy land and the main kingdoms of the age.

At Harsha's Court and the Return to China

Harsha welcomed the pilgrim to his court, at a time when two more ambassadors from China were also present. Xuanzang persuaded Harsha to send an emissary to the Tang emperor Taizong, and these diplomatic ties helped him return to a China whose ban on foreign travel he had broken. He reached Chang'an in the first month of 645, and the emperor honoured him, although he refused every high civil post.

He brought back more than 600 manuscripts of Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, carried by twenty horses, along with images and relics, and spent the rest of his life translating them into Chinese. The Chinese emperor asked him to write his travel record, and the book was compiled in 646. The link with the Tang court had a sequel after the king's death in 647. The Tang envoy Wang Xuance reached India in 648, found that Harsha had died, and was attacked by the new king's forces.

The Si-yu-ki: Hiuen Tsang's Book on India

The Si-yu-ki, known in Chinese as the Datang Xiyuji and in English as the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, is Xuanzang's travel record. It runs to twelve volumes of more than 120,000 Chinese characters and describes the geography, climate, products, people, languages, history, politics, economic life, religion and customs of 110 countries, regions and city-states. Samuel Beal translated it into English in 1884 as Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, and a companion biography, the Life of Hiuen-Tsiang, was written by the monk Hwui Li.

For India the book is a first-hand description of towns and kingdoms, the religious map of the early seventh century, and the condition of Buddhist sites. It has also guided archaeologists, because its exact descriptions of distances and locations helped scholars find sites such as Rajagriha, Sarnath, Ajanta and the ruins of Nalanda.

What Xuanzang Tells Us About Society

Xuanzang describes Indian towns with square walls, winding narrow streets and shops along the roads, and homes built mostly of brick, bamboo or wood. People whose work involved killing, such as butchers, fishers, executioners and scavengers, were not allowed to live inside the city; in his words, their houses were surrounded by low walls and formed the suburbs, which is evidence of social exclusion. Children began school at seven, and the five branches of learning he lists are grammar, technical skills, medicine, logic and inner knowledge, the last being the Buddhist philosophy of cause and effect.

His account also shows how cities changed. He noted the decline of Kausambi and Shravasti but described thriving cities such as Thanesar, Kannauj and Kashi, so the picture after the Guptas is mixed and not one of general urban decline. He was himself robbed by bandits in the Great Palasha forest after leaving Sakala, a reminder that the roads were not free from danger.

Limits of Xuanzang as a Source

Xuanzang's record has clear limits. The book mixes first-hand observation, hearsay and some implausible tales, such as the story of a Brahmin said to be seven hundred years old. Xuanzang wrote as a Buddhist monk, so he gave far more space to monasteries and Buddhist lore than to the rest of society, and he could be partisan, as in his treatment of Shashanka, the Gauda king of Bengal.

His numbers are also unreliable. He states that the Nalanda faculty had about 1,510 teachers, and Harsha's grant is said to have supported 1,500 teachers and 10,000 student monks, yet excavations show too few rooms to house that many. His figure of 100 Buddhist monasteries with 10,000 priests at Kanchi is likewise likely exaggerated. His phrase "the Five Indias" under Harsha's allegiance is hyperbole and cannot fix the size of the empire.

Nalanda Mahavihara in the Age of Harsha

Foundation and Royal Patrons

Nalanda Mahavihara was a great Buddhist monastery-university in Magadha, in present-day Bihar. A seal found at the site names Shakraditya, usually identified with the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, as its founder, and its date of foundation is placed around 427 CE. The Gupta rulers were devotees of Vishnu, yet they patronised Buddhist institutions, including the renowned Nalanda.

Nalanda flourished under the patronage of the Gupta Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries and later under Harsha, its most notable patron after the Guptas, and it served as a monastic and scholastic centre from the fifth to the thirteenth century. Inscriptions at Nalanda show that kings gave gifts of villages to support its work, and Harsha is said to have granted the revenue of 100 villages, with 200 households from each supplying the monks with rice, butter and milk. Later, the Palas continued the support; Yijing mentions that revenues of 200 villages were assigned to it in his time.

Studies, Silabhadra and Daily Life at Nalanda

Every student at Nalanda studied the Mahayana, and the students also studied the Vedas, logic, grammar and philology, medicine and Samkhya. A student had to be skilled in the logic of every school, because the monks were expected to defend Buddhist positions in debate. Xuanzang studied logic, grammar, Sanskrit and the Yogacara school during his years there and later lectured at the monastery.

Yijing adds details of daily life, such as the morning bell, bathing rules at the monastery's ten pools and decisions taken by assembly and consensus of the resident monks. The library of Nalanda, spread over three multi-storey buildings in Tibetan tradition and known as Dharmaganja, held manuscripts in great number, and both Yijing and Xuanzang spent time there studying manuscripts and selecting many to take to China.

Xuanzang's teacher at Nalanda was Silabhadra, the abbot and a master of Yogacara teachings. Xuanzang visited Nalanda in 637 and again in 642, and the total of his stay is put at around two years. He received the Indian name Mokshadeva, and he believed that in Silabhadra he had found the incomparable teacher his long journey was meant to reach.

Silabhadra's line of teaching ran from Asanga and Vasubandhu to Dignaga and Dharmapala. Through Xuanzang this Yogacara tradition passed to China, where his Cheng Weishi Lun became the great summary of that teaching and led to the Faxiang school of Chinese Buddhism.

Decline, Legacy and the Comparison with Taxila

Nalanda suffered attacks by the Huns in the fifth century and by a Gauda king of Bengal in the eighth, and the forces of Bakhtiyar Khalji burnt it around 1200. Its library is said to have burned for months, and Tibetan scholars fled with as many manuscripts as they could carry. Its ruins were recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016, and a relic said to be Xuanzang's skull was placed in 2007 in a memorial hall at Nalanda.

Nalanda is often compared with Taxila. Taxila was far older, a Gandhara city on the Indus with a settlement of about 1000 BCE and a strategic place on the Grand Trunk Road, and its teachers worked as independent masters without a central syllabus, degrees or fees. Nalanda, by contrast, was a royally endowed residential monastery with a library, a large faculty and a fixed curriculum.

Banabhatta, the Harshacharita and the Other Sources for Harsha

Bana's Life at Kanyakubja and the Eight Ucchvasas

Banabhatta was the court poet of Harsha at Kanyakubja. He was born to a Kanyakubja Brahmin family in the village of Pritikuta and met the emperor near the town of Manitara after receiving a letter from a cousin of the king. The Harshacharita is a biography of Harshavardhana, ruler of Kanauj, composed in Sanskrit by Banabhatta in the seventh century CE.

The Harshacharita tells the story in eight chapters called ucchvasas, written in ornate poetic prose. The first two give Bana's ancestry and early life. The book is the source for much of what is known about Harsha's youth, including the murder of his brother Rajyavardhana by the Gauda king and the rescue of his sister Rajyashri. It is regarded as the first historical biography in Sanskrit, and it also holds the earliest clear reference to the chaturanga, the ancestor of chess.

Kadambari and Harsha's Own Plays

Bana is also the author of the Kadambari, a romantic novel in Sanskrit and one of the world's first novels. He died before finishing it, and his son Bhushanabhatta completed it. Because Bana also wrote the Harshacharita about his patron, he can be dated with reasonable certainty to the king's reign.

Harsha himself is credited with three Sanskrit plays: Ratnavali, Nagananda and Priyadarsika. Some critics have held that a court poet named Dhavaka wrote them on commission, while others accept the king as their author. Such literature is useful for details of governance, society, technology and clothing. Ratnavali is one of the first texts to mention the festival of Holi.

Other Evidence and the Value of Each Source

A copper-plate inscription found at Banskhera in Uttar Pradesh, in Nagari script, bears the king's own signature, "svahasto mama mahārājādhirāja śhrī harṣhasya", meaning "by my own hand, the great king of kings, Shri Harsha". A coin of Harsha with a peacock on the reverse also survives. Together with the land-grant inscriptions, seals and plays, these give the royal side of the story.

The Harshacharita and Xuanzang's Records are the two main accounts, and each corrects the other. Bana was a patron's poet, so his description of the king is not unbiased and presents his actions in a favourable light. Xuanzang was a visitor and a monk, so he is strong on religion and weak on the court's inner life.

Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing: The Chinese Pilgrims Compared

The Three Chinese Pilgrims and Their Ages

The earliest foreign account of India came long before the pilgrims. The Greek historian and diplomat Megasthenes, hosted at the court of Chandragupta Maurya, wrote the Indika, the first such written account, now lost except for some excerpts.

The three famous Chinese pilgrims came later, in three different periods and by different routes. Faxian left Chang'an in 399, at about the age of sixty, with a small band and spent ten years in India, reaching Pataliputra and visiting sites linked to the Buddha. His visit fell in the reign of Chandragupta II, and his book is the Foguoji, the Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. His picture of Gupta towns has charity houses for the poor and the sick, free medicines and well-kept lanes, and elsewhere he also described the harsh treatment of the chandalas, who lived outside the city.

Yijing left China in 671, travelled by the maritime Silk Road and reached India in 673. He spent ten of his fourteen years in India at Nalanda, returned in 695 with about 400 Sanskrit texts and wrote the Record of Buddhist Practices Sent Home from the Southern Sea. Unlike Xuanzang, who described geography and culture, Yijing mostly recorded monastic rules and customs.

Arab Travellers as Later Accounts

Arab travellers wrote the next group of foreign accounts of India. Al-Masudi, a historian and geographer who lived from about 896 to 956, supplemented his reading with personal experience of the western part of the subcontinent and noticed relations between Muslims and Hindus in the states he saw. Al-Biruni went with Mahmud of Ghazni's campaigns in the subcontinent from 1017, knew Sanskrit, and finished around 1030 his book on India, the Tahqiq ma li-l-Hind, in which he documented the civilian and scholarly side of Indian life, including religion, science and the calendar.

Chinese pilgrims are mainly religious witnesses of the first millennium, while the Arab authors give a view from the early medieval period and cover more of science, religion and the politics of the states they saw.

Why Foreign Accounts Matter and Where They Fall Short

Foreign accounts give an outsider's description of what local texts took for granted. They cover towns, roads, the position of lower groups, education, monasteries and the rhythm of religious life. They help date events, since the events, names and texts that Xuanzang mentions cannot be later than 645, and they point archaeologists to sites.

They also fall short in four ways. Their authors chose what to record by their own religion or interest. They often relied on hearsay. Their numbers are frequently inflated. And they saw only the regions and groups they reached. Historians therefore treat them as one strand to be checked against inscriptions, coins, excavation and local literature.

Sources

• NCERT: Class 6 Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Chapter 5
• NCERT: Class 7 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 1, Chapter 4
• NCERT: Class 7 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 1, Chapter 5
• NCERT: Class 7 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 1, Chapter 7
• NCERT: Class 7 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 2, Chapter 3
• NCERT: Class 7 Exploring Society: India and Beyond Book 2, Chapter 4
• NCERT: Class 9 Understanding Society: India and Beyond Book 1, Chapter 4
• NCERT: Class 12 Themes in Indian History Book 1, Chapter 2
• Government of Uttar Pradesh, Kannauj district: History
• Government of Bihar, Nalanda district: History
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara
• Wikipedia: Al-Biruni
• Wikipedia: Al-Masudi
• Wikipedia: Banabhatta
• Wikipedia: Faxian
• Wikipedia: Fourth Buddhist council
• Wikipedia: Great Tang Records on the Western Regions
• Wikipedia: Harsha
• Wikipedia: Harshacharita
• Wikipedia: Kadambari
• Wikipedia: Kanishka
• Wikipedia: Kumbh Mela
• Wikipedia: Mahayana
• Wikipedia: Megasthenes
• Wikipedia: Nalanda
• Wikipedia: Pushyabhuti dynasty
• Wikipedia: Ratnavali
• Wikipedia: Silabhadra
• Wikipedia: Taxila
• Wikipedia: Xuanzang
• Wikipedia: Yijing (monk)
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers