On to Shen-shen and thence to Khoten
After travelling for seventeen days, a distance we may calculate of about 1500 li, the pilgrims reached the kingdom of Shen-shen, a country rugged and hilly, with a thin and barren soil. The clothes of the common people are coarse, and like those worn in our land of Han, [1] some wearing felt and others coarse serge or cloth of hair; this was the only difference seen among them. The king professed our Law, and there might be in the country more than four thousand monks, who were all students of the hînayâna. [2] The common people of this and other kingdoms in that region, as well as the Sramans, [3] all practise the rules of India, only that the latter do so more exactly, and the former more loosely. So the travellers found it in all the kingdoms through which they went on their way from this to the west, only that each had its own peculiar barbarous speech. The monks, however, who had given up the worldly life and quitted their families, were all students of Indian books and the Indian language. Here they stayed for about a month, and then proceeded on their journey, fifteen days' walking to the northwest bringing them to the country of Woo-e. In this also there were more than four thousand monks, all students of the hînayâna. They were very strict in their rules, so that Sramans from the territory of Ts'in were all unprepared for their regulations. Fâ-hien, through the management of Foo Kung-sun, maître d'hotellerie, was able to remain with his company in the monastery where they were received for more than two months, and here they were rejoined by Pâo-yun and his friends. At the end of that time the people of Woo-e neglected the duties of propriety and righteousness, and treated the strangers in so niggardly a manner that Che-yen, Hwuy-keen, and Hwuy-wei went back towards Kâo-ch'ang, hoping to obtain there the means of continuing their journey. Fâ-hien and the rest, however, through the liberality of Foo Kung-sun, managed to go straight forward in a southwest direction. They found the country uninhabited as they went along. The difficulties which they encountered in crossing the streams and on their route, and the sufferings which they endured, were unparalleled in human experience, but in the course of a month and five days they succeeded in reaching Yu-teen.
[Footnote 1: This is the name which Fâ-hien always uses when he would speak of China, his native country, as a whole, calling it from the great dynasty which had ruled it, first and last, for between four and five centuries. Occasionally, as we shall immediately see, he speaks of "the territory of Ts'in or Ch'in," but intending thereby only the kingdom of Ts'in, having its capital in Ch'ang-gan.]
[Footnote 2: Meaning the "small vehicle, or conveyance." There are in Buddhism the triyâna, or "three different means of salvation, i.e. of conveyance across the samsâra, or sea of transmigration, to the shores of nirvâna. Afterwards the term was used to designate the different phases of development through which the Buddhist dogma passed, known as the mahâyâna, hînayâna, and madhyamayâna." "The hînayâna is the simplest vehicle of salvation, corresponding to the first of the three degrees of saintship." E.H., pp. 151-2, 45, and 117.]
[Footnote 3: "Sraman" may in English take the place of Sramana, the name for Buddhist monks, as those who have separated themselves from (left) their families, and quieted their hearts from all intrusion of desire and lust.]