In westernmost China
lie 100,000 square miles of desert and misery.
Once cities thrived here,
oases enriched by China's fabled Silk Road,
until war and the desert did them in.
It's a wasteland so cruel its name itself is a warning
'Taklimakan' means those who go in don't come out.
Two courageous men entered the Taklimakan
one in search of truth, the other, treasure.
Both battled for their lives against the haunted desert
and in the grip of death
found treasures that would change the world.
Budapest, Hungary, 1872.
A studious 10 year old explores a map of Central Asia.
Fascinated by the exotic East,
young Aurel Stein follows the path of his hero,
Alexander the Great.
The first world's conqueror marched his armies
from the Mediterranean all the way to India.
The land where Alexander's conquest ended captivated the boy.
Much of the region where east meets west
was so wild and remote it had never been mapped.
Here treasures from a secret past surely lay hidden in sands.
The shy young scholar's obsession surprised no one.
So lost in ideas was the boy that his own family considered him boring.
What no one could guess
how firmly this region and habit of solitude
would shape Aurel Stein's life.
And how alone, for years at a time,
he would take on some of the most daring archeological explorations
of the 20th century.
His favorite place was this place called Mohan Marg,
which was a field up in ashmir in the mountains
that was only free from snow in the summer.
And he would go up there with some texts and sit and write
all day long.
I think at one point he wrote 200 pages in 20 days,
so he didn't see to need to be with people, but he needed letters.
25 August 1891.
The tribal people who pasture their flocks in the high valleys
gave me a real serenade.
Some of the songs were very melodic and reminded me of Hungarian songs.
You have to be solitary
because the thing is about exploration
is you've got to be at peace with yourself.
You've got to be content with your own company
in order to do something like that.
You couldn't sit doing what Aurel Stein did
sitting in the middle of a vast windswept desert for months on end,
with nobody to speak to in the English language
except for your dog,
but you're not going to get an answer from a dog.
Stein's boyhood obsession with Central Asia
flowered at universities in Austria and England.
He studied ancient languages
to understand the ruins he'd one day explore
and translate documents pulled from the ground.
A Ph. D. In oriental languages was Stein's ticket to Asia.
He landed a position with the British government in Pakistan,
which was then part of British India.
His home base for the rest of his life would be Lahore
in India's Punjab,
the farthest point reached by Alexander the Great
in his bid to conquer the world.
At the Lahore Museum,
Stein discovered the artistic legacy of Alexander's conquests.
Images of the Buddha with a decidedly Grecian look.
How far east, he wondered, did his legacy reach?
It was a question Stein would pursue
all the way to China's Taklimakan desert.
Aurel Stein was interested in the connection between civilizations.
He was fascinated by the remnants of Greek influence in Pakistan,
and that he felt there was a connection
between that and the art in the Taklimakan desert.
Before Stein came here, he was well prepared.
He had very special training in ancient languages, such as Sanskrit.
At the time, Sanskrit is an incredibly hot field.
I mean, people are so excited by the idea that
Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, they're all in the European languages.
So, today, I think, when people study Sanskrit it seems so archaic,
but for Stein it was computer science
it was the computer science of the 19th century.
Armed with Sanskrit, Stein got practical field experience
around colonial India with the British Army.
Stein accompanied army maneuvers as regimental map maker.
He had done a year of military service in Hungary
and he learned how to survey,
and that proved to be crucial to everything he did
because when he went out into Inner Asia, he made maps.
In some cases
his maps are still the most accurate maps we have of the region.
In India, Stein put his scholarship to work.
He began closely examining a book
By a long dead Chinese monk called Xuanzang.
Around 630 A. D., on a quest for Buddhist scripture,
the holy man had trekked some 10,000 miles from China to India and back.
His account of his travels called "Records of the Western Regions,"
gave Stein an authoritative guide to temples in colonial India,
temples that had been living centers of worship in Xuanzang's time.
When Aurel Stein was in ashmir he tested out Xuanzang
to see whether his topographical information was correct, and it was.
So for all three of his expeditions he had Xuanzang with him.
The monk proved to be an infallible guide in India.
But Xuanzang had also written about a thriving civilization
in hina's Taklimakan desert.
About this wasteland the modern world knew almost nothing.
Had Xuanzang given Stein a treasure map to a lost civilization?
And he realizes that he can go into Chinese Turkestan and discover things,
and discover a past,
and that's what becomes his real intellectual passion.
And Stein makes a case to the British government in India
that they should fund him to go out there and explore.
And I think Stein is saying let me go to this whole region
and I will come back and tell you what the history of it is.
In 1900, financed by England,
Stein headed east to seek the lost world of his dreams.
His goal to track down the cities and civilizations
written about by Xuanzang.
With a crew of translators and servants,
Stein crossed the Pamir Mountains and dropped down to ashgar.
From there he followed the southern arm of the Silk Road,
the ancient trade rout followed by Xuanzang
on his return from India around 640 A. D.
The thousand mile journey was a brutal ordeal
from man and beast alike, and it had barely begun.
The morning of the 7 th December.
Starting the campaign in the desert.
My goal: Dandan uilk.
Most of the time Stein worked during the months of December to January,
and that was always the driest and coldest season.
He had to carry a huge amount of ice with him as a source of water
so he could leave it behind at certain stations
to ensure there was enough on the return trip.
Also the cold and dryness are very much a threat.
One could easily get lost and die.
It was the most difficult terrain that anybody could go to at the time.
I think the best modern equivalent is going to the moon.
Now Stein's navigation skills kept his men alive,
for he had entered the Taklimakan,
one of the most dangerous deserts on earth.
About this desert, the monk Xuanzang had warned:
It is all the work of demons and evil spirits.
When the winds rise, both man and beast become confused and forgetful.
Sad and plaintive noise are heard, and piteous cries.
Combined with the site of this place
where nothing lives, man often lose their lives.
Characteristically, Stein ignored these warnings
and even the haunted desert's Dante esque name.
The Chinese call it 'the Desert of Death'.
The name Taklimakan translates as 'you go in but you do not come out.'
The temperature of the desert is formidable. In the summer
the temperature can reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is also a winter desert,
when Aurel Stein was excavating sites like Niya,
he did record snow in the desert in December.
The worst part about the desert is that the sand dunes are so high;
in places they are 1,000 feet high.
So it is very difficult to walk through them
because they are soft sand.
When you're walking through such a sea of sand
it is very difficult to think that you might come out at the other end.
But it is also very inspiring to walk somewhere
where you know it is virgin sand and nobody else has walked it before.
Yet Stein was convinced that people had walked there,
some 1,000 years before.
Xuanzang had written about oasis cities
that had been thriving centers of trade and religion
now buried somewhere in the desert.
If Stein could find them he'd be the first to write the history
of a vast unmapped region of Asia.
But at what cost?
100 miles into the Taklimakan
the temperature plunged to 10 degrees below zero.
Hobbled by the loose sand, men and animals grew exhausted.
Was the monk Xuanzang guiding them to a lost city
or a dusty grave?
Finally, on the 11th day hope.
Traces of a ruin natives called 'the Place of lvory Houses.'
It was the first in a series of sites
where Stein would find evidence that stunned even him.
Stein excavates.
And he finds pictures of Westerners in the middle of the desert.
They saw pictures of angels in this region that is now a part of China.
He also finds some Chinese written on wooden slips.
And you could date the slips to the end of the 8th century.
And that it was going to be possible for him to write a history
of the different Silk Road oases by careful excavation
and by taking all the documents that he found
and sending them to scholars who could decipher them for him.
For Stein the remarkable discoveries were deeply personal.
First, the civilization that he found showed signs of ancient Greece.
Alexander the Great's influence had penetrated China.
Second, he'd uncovered scrolls from the monastery library
dating from the 5th and 6th centuries.
On his return trip from India,
Xuanzang would probably have visited the monastery now
buried by the desert.
Perhaps he'd even poured over these scrolls.
Stein must have felt how his own monastic life
mirrored that of the solitary holy man.
One year after he'd set out, Stein turned for home.
With him, cases of artifacts evidence of a lost civilization.
They would set the world of archeology on fire
and make his name.
But they would also give him a reputation as an archeological looter
that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Stein had the approval of the Chinese government.
But on his travel papers it didn't say he was an archeologist
and would carry on excavations in this area.
A British diplomat had told Stein,
"Never tell the Chinese you're doing excavation here."
In time, Stein's disregard for Chinese authority would catch up with him,
but now he had more pressing concerns.
Because of his discoveries the whole world
knew what lay beneath the Taklimakan.
The race is on.
Stein goes digs in the ground,
and then a kind of race starts to discover the lost
languages and documents
of this very remote region of the world.
And it becomes, kind of, a mark of a civilized country
to have an expedition in Central Asia.
In 1907, a German archeologist had just returned
from what was said to be a very profitable trip.
A French orientalist was scheduled to enter the desert any day.
Spurred by competition,
Stein set out on a course chartered by Xuanzang.
Once more his company traced the southern arm of the Silk Road.
But this time the grueling trip gave Stein a sense of foreboding.
He wrote to a friend:
What a desolate wilderness, bearing everywhere the imprint of death.
On two expeditions the desert had taken a grim toll.
His crew had quarreled and come to blows.
One of his most trusted assistants had tried to kill himself.
Now, without warning, /Stein's devoted surveyor went blind.
Finally, Stein's own health gave out.
Malaria racked his exhausted body.
And worse,
the French team of explorers were somewhere in the desert.
As he packed his new finds into crates,
Stein was anxious about his next destination,
a cave complex called Dunhaung
where he hoped to find ancient Buddhist scrolls.
It is an anxious thought, as you can imagine,
whether I shall find the French there already.
Crossing the Taklimakan to the north,
Stein had the eerie experience of stumbling across his own footsteps.
I could quite distinctly recognize my own footprints
of seven years before.
I could even make out those of my little fox terrier, Dash,
the ever faithful companion of that journey.
More shocking, was evidence of German and French expeditions.
Where Stein carefully protected his digs by filling in them in afterwards,
his competitors left theirs open to the elements.
Artifacts whose value they dismissed
were recklessly tossed aside and broken.
Near Dunhaung, Stein recruited a new team of workers
to explore the westernmost section of China's Great Wall.
Of this crew Stein remarked:
They're the craziest crew I've had led to digging.
So turbulent and feebled by opium are they.
Yet the discovery of Great Wall remnants revived his spirits.
If his second expedition had ended there,
it would have been enough to secure any archeologist's reputation.
I feel, as I ride along the wall,
as if I were going to inspect posts still held by the living;
2000 years seems so brief a time.
At the Wall,
just days away from his greatest discovery, Stein felt at peace.
Perhaps he through that the monk Xuanzang
was literally guiding his journey.
Perhaps he knew his competitors could never match
his stamina or his scholarship.
In any case, his devotion to the haunted desert had rewarded him
beyond his greatest expectations.
And still ahead, at a place called Dunhaung,
he would find one of the astonishing ancient texts ever discovered.
Aurel Stein heard that
there were some very valuable documents in the Dunhaung caves,
and he went there and he met somebody called Abbot Wong,
who was sort of a curious moody monk,
who had sealed up the caves so that nobody could get in.
So when Stein finally met him, he said, you know,
I've been following in the footsteps of Xuanzang on all my journeys.
He's my patron saint.
So the moody abbot sort of softened and said, "Oh?"
The priest proved, in fact, quite as ardent an admirer
of Xuanzang as I am.
He proudly showed the series of painting
representing scenes from the great pilgrim's marvelous adventures.
The fantastic legends there depicted were just those
which had transformed Xuanzang
throughout China as a sort of saintly Munchausen.
He negotiates four silver horseshoes
for thousands and thousands of documents and scrolls,
and Wong goes for it.
And Stein knows that it is a really low price.
He knows.
He writes a letter saying I've gotten an incredibly good price,
because one of the Sanskrit manuscripts in and of itself
would be worth that price.
But most of all was the apprehension that the timorous,
shifty priest
would be moved in a sudden fit of alarm
or distrust to close down his shell
before I had been able to extract any of the pearls.
Stein was a devoted scholar and explorer.
It was unthinkable to him
not to be interested in the things he found in Dunhaung,
and it is just natural for him to try any means to get what he wanted.
He and Abbot Wong were not on the same level.
Stein was very educated and knowledgeable,
while Abbot Wong was relatively ignorant about what Stein was doing.
They were just piles of waste paper to Wong.
Like a chip of broken glass to me, to you is a diamond.
The ancient scrolls Stein took from Dunhaung included ballads,
stories and correspondence a portrait of a civilization in letters.
One of the fragments has since been thought to belong to a Buddhist text,
which Xuanzang himself is known to have translated
between 645 and 664 AD.
I felt quite sure that my patron saint must have passed
within a few years of the debris covered here.
Stein was able to get many of the documents,
take them back to the British Museum,
and one of them is the Diamond Sutra,
which is the world's oldest printed book.
It sits in the British Museum opposite the Gutenberg Bible.
So Stein really this was the triumph of his career.
For misleading the abbot, Stein felt no regret.
He reasoned the scrolls he salvaged
would have remained lost forever had he not intervened.
You know, the easy answer to "Is Stein a thief?"
The very PC answer is, sure, he took away antiquities from China,
and they were never returned.
But if you judge him by the standards of his day,
he wasn't a thief; he was an explorer.
He published everything he found.
If we judge Stein or the fate of the manuscripts
by the person who discovered them,
if you were found by the Chinese, it's very hard for us to see you.
You were a lucky manuscript to be discovered by Stein
because people today can see you, they can actually see you
on the Web.
For his astounding discoveries,
Stein would receive a knighthood from his adopted homeland, England.
But the comforts and adulations of Europe
paled against the call of the East.
Again and again he would return to this bleak part of the world
to try and slake his thirst from knowledge in the deserts of China.
At 81, Stein would die as he lived
in the saddle while exploring Afghanistan.
But he would never again match the solitary years long struggle
that put him on the trail of Xuanzang
and the lost treasures of the Taklimakan.
The Dunhaung Scrolls made archeologist Aurel Stein's reputation.
His Chinese translator speculated that
finding the rare Buddhist text was no accident.
They were a gift from the monk Xuanzang sent across a sea of time.
Xuanzang, like Stein, had risked his life not once,
but many times for the sake of these scrolls.
One of history's most remarkable journeys began in a world in crisis.
China, 620 A. D.
As the great Tang Dynasty begins, the nation convulses in violence.
Bandits beseech cities within,
while neighboring kingdoms assail its waters.
China's golden age is born in blood.
In a remote trade depot, a figure in peasant's robes,
takes advantage of the chaos to flee China.
He's a monk on a suicidal mission to aid Buddhism in China.
In the crisis, the Tang emperor has forbidden foreign travel,
but the monk has ignored the ban.
He hopes his disguise will fool the emperor's henchman.
But there's no disguising this monk's size.
Xuanzang was supposed to be 7 feet tall.
There may be some difference in the way Chinese calculate things,
but he was very tall and he had black bright eyes.
You know, the descriptions of him
make him sound like some idyllic creature.
From boyhood, Xuanzang had always been larger than life.
By age 13 he had mastered the Buddhist texts.
By 20, he had humbled the faith's most renounced scholars
in debate.
Xuanzang's virtuosity delighted the priests.
'The shining of the sun of wisdom,'
they had told the young monk, 'will surely depend on you.'
In fact, Xuanzang would light the way
for generations of Buddhists and explorers of Central Asia.
There is no question
about the historical judgments of Xuanzang's contribution.
By any standards he is a hero.
He is a hero in many ways.
He is a very inspiring figure
not just for people in his age, but also for people born in the world.
At age 26, Xuanzang wasn't yet a hero, but a wanted man on
a holy mission.
His study of Buddhist texts had revealed grave contradictions.
His solution to travel to India and obtain the original teachings.
He is frustrated that
he had multiple versions of the same text that conflict,
and that nobody in China could reconcile the differences.
His thirst for knowledge is so great,
he decides the only way out of that dilemma is to go to India
and find the original teachings.
The devout Buddhist had another reason for the trek.
He wanted to make the pilgrimage to India,
the birthplace of his beloved Buddha.
600 years before Christ, an Indian prince renounced the world
to search for a solution of death and human suffering.
After six years of spiritual discipline, he achieved
supreme enlightenment
while meditating at a place called Bodh Gaya.
For the rest of his life,
the gifted teacher was known as Buddha,
which means 'the enlightened one.'
There are four places that every believing Buddhist should go to:
Where the Buddha was born, where he died,
where he preached his first sermon, and where he achieved enlightenment.
So Xuanzang was a pilgrim.
He wanted to go to the Buddhist holy land,
just as a Christian might want to go to Bethlehem.
Yet the trip came with unholy risks.
When the Chinese Emperor Taizong got wind of Xuanzang's plan,
he ordered the monk's arrest.
Under this threat,
the monks accompanying Xuanzang lost their taste for the journey.
Perhaps it was just as well.
According to caravan traders,
the road to India was choked with murderous bandits and wild beasts.
And the worst threat lay just ahead the Taklimakan desert.
Somebody called it "the abomination of desolation."
It is a place where you go in and you don't come out.
Even Aurel Stein talks about other deserts in Arabia
as being tame deserts.
By day its temperatures can reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit,
and by night plummet to 20 below.
According to legend, thriving cities, whose souls numbered
in the thousands,
had vanished in its black hurricanes, never to be seen again.
Caravan traders warned the unworldly Xuanzang about the dangers,
but the pilgrim replied:
I intend to visit the holy places and seek the law.
I will not regret if I should die on my way.
But years of monastic study hadn't prepared Xuanzang
for the desert's special tortures.
Of this desolate badlands he wrote:
There are no birds in the sky, no beasts on the ground,
no water or vegetation anywhere.
So he's alone.
And he started across the desert, a couple of hundred miles it was,
and his water bag fell down into the group.
The water spills.
And he travels for four and a half days with no water,
and he is hopelessly lost.
Now Xuanzang considered turning back,
but he no longer knew which direction that was.
According to his biographer,
the monk was assailed by the desert's restless spirits.
By day, the wind whipped up terrible sandstorms.
By night, demons and goblins bearing torches
are as many in number as the stars.
The monk prayed to Buddhist guardian spirits to protect his soul.
It was kind of what some Christian mystics
call a dark night of the soul.
He ran out into the unknown, he experiences terrible things.
He has this dark night of the soul.
This is a typical's hero's journey in the Taklimakan desert.
In the dream a spirit called out,
"Why are you resting when you should be marching forward to India?"
It was the horse that seemed to take offense.
He set off in his own direction, Xuanzang following behind.
After four miles, the horse broke into a trot
as a green oasis came into view.
And this old and sickly horse, which has been recommended to him
because it has done the trip 30 times, takes him to an oasis,
and he falls into this pool of water and drinks and drinks.
He was able to survive.
He was able the find water and other food to eat.
This must have meant a lot to him.
I think in his mind this must be a kind of blessing from
Buddha himself.
The stories about people finding water in the desert are recurrent, right?
It happens to Xuanzang;
it happens to Sven Hedin, it happens to Aurel Stein.
Anybody who goes into the desert runs out of water,
and then the ones who live tells us the same story.
The ones who die, don't tell us anything.
Safely across the Taklimakan, Xuanzang entered the kingdom of Turfan.
Again, he was proceeded by his reputation
but as a holy man, not an outlaw.
The king and queen of Turfan were overjoyed
to have such a renowned scholar for company.
"From the first day I heard your name," said the king,
"I've been in a state of ecstacy.
I couldn't keep my hands and feet still from excitement.
But when Xuanzang told him of his mission, the king became stormy.
He demanded the monk cease his journey and remain in Turfan.
He wanted Xuanzang to be his resident guru.
He wanted him to stay there and not go to the West.
He got very angry at Xuanzang and shouted at him and said,
You've got to stay here. I'm not going to let you go."
Xuanzang objected.
I came here on my way to obtaining the Great Law.
You can imprison my flesh and bones, but you cannot rule my spirit.
So he decided to starve himself.
He fasted for four or five days. He didn't take water or anything.
Each day the king brought him rich food,
but Xuanzang wouldn't touch a morsel.
Again he almost died, and the king of Turfan was shamed and he gave in.
And then the king of Turfan gave him gold and silver
and 24 letters of introduction
to all the kings and khans all the way up to India.
So he had protection.
He was going to be taken care of for the rest of his journey.
The king provides servants and horses and clothes.
The most crucial thing the king gives him is contact with the Turks
who control the region west of China with whom the king has allied.
So suddenly Xuanzang has gone from this solitary march
through the desert
to having a retinue with him and diplomatic credentials.
With India almost in sight,
Xuanzang approached the fulfillment of his mission
and the greatest trials of his life.
By now, Xuanzang had trekked more than fifteen hundred miles.
He had become a skillful traveler,
falling in step with the merchants and pilgrims
whose precious goods enriched the trade depots of western China.
He grew into the roles of accidental diplomat and impromptu preacher.
And throughout, the always hearty giant endured the unexpected.
After he leaves Turfan, he doesn't have to worry about money, right?
He's bankrolled and he has diplomatic credentials.
But then he has the problems that beset rich travelers,
like robbers.
There are a bunch of robbers that are interested in clothes.
That is interesting.
He's robbed twice of his own clothes.
He was not just once robbed on his journey
he was robbed many times.
Because of his inner strength sometimes even under great danger
he was able to escape from those dangers.
Finally a year after plunging into the desert
the pilgrim set foot on Indian soil.
He'd proved wrong all predictions of his imminent death
and reached the country of his beloved Buddha.
Guided by priests, he visited sacred 'stupas' or shrines,
examining the stories painted on the walls and committing them to memory.
Assisted by as many as 20 scribes, Xuanzang got down to business
translating and copying Buddhist scripture.
The most significant contribution he made
is to translate a large amount of Indian Buddhist scripture.
Scholars are amazed at how accurate his translations are.
His reputation seems, by this time, to have proceeded him,
so that when he got to a new place monks seemed to know all about him.
It was customary for the kings,
when he got to the border, they would come and meet him.
They would give him a big elephant to ride on.
Seven years passed like a dream.
Xuanzang's celebrated knowledge carried him
and his scribes from one monastery to the next.
At each awaited new Buddhist texts and spirited debate.
It was customary in many of those countries
in northern India to have a debate.
There are several kinds of Buddhism,
and so an exponent of one kind would debate against another kind.
And he studied the other guys' beliefs
so that he knew their arguments and his arguments.
And that may be one of the reasons that he was so good.
Xuanzang never loses a debate with anybody,
even if he's debating in Sanskrit
on arcane points of Buddhist document in India.
It's just not credible.
Every time that he meets somebody, he bests that person in the debate.
At last it came time for Xuanzang to fulfill his personal pilgrimage.
He and his followers traveled by boat down the sacred Ganges River
their destination, Bodh Gaya,
the place of the Buddha's spiritual transformation.
But on the river, according to his biographer, another calamity awaited.
A whole mess of pirates came in and took his party,
and shoved them ashore.
They wanted a sacrifice for their god, Durga.
They said, oh, there's that handsome fellow, he'll be just fine.
They decided he's the perfect sacrifice.
They tell him this, and he has a very Buddhist response
which is he doesn't wanted to be killed,
but if he's going to be killed, that's fine
he wants to be allowed to meditate.
If this cold body is suitable for sacrifice,
then I dare not crush the offer.
But if you kills this body of mine, I fear it will bring you misfortune.
At that moment a tremendous gale came
that scared the hell out of the pirates.
And so they said, who is this man?
He was really not afraid of death.
He was prepared for death.
He is not just a courageous person;
he was also a very calm person, an intelligent person.
Whenever he faced difficulty, he always showed this kind of calmness.
So, of course, according to the biographer
they threw away their weapons,
and they became good Buddhist, so to speak.
This is another story that follows a very fixed pattern,
which is that a representative of the Buddha
encounters the representatives of a given local deity,
and the Buddha bests the local deity
the Buddha proves that he's more powerful than the local deity.
So, did it happen? We don't know!
These are just stories, I think, but they're good ones.
Finally, Xuanzang arrived at Bodh Gaya.
Here the Buddha had achieved enlightenment.
But for the wandering pilgrim, something very different was in store.
Xuanzang's trials and years of devotion did not yield
even a taste of the sublime unity experienced by the Buddha.
Instead, under the sacred tree where the Buddha was transformed,
Xuanzang could only weep at the frailty of his own mortal spirit.
When Xuanzang finally got there, he knelt down and he asked himself:
"In what cycle of life was I when the Buddha lived?"
And then he wept.
And there were lots of other Buddhist monks around,
and they were all very moved by this.
At a time when the Buddha perfected himself,
I know not in what condition I was in,
but in the troublesome world of birth and death.
It's very rare for an enlightened Buddhist monk to do so,
and he was crying almost, prostrating.
This kind of gesture was witnessed by any visitors at the time.
Where Xuanzang saw unworthiness, the witnesses saw breakthrough.
The most virtuous among them bent with humility.
This is somebody
whose whole travel description is completely dry and factual.
He has, for him, a very emotional experience
bursting into tears and saying that he can never be
as good as the Buddha.
In a remarkable adventure, this was Xuanzang's moment of truth.
He was perfectly humble for a Buddhist, a perfect state.
At last he arose more determined than ever
to pursue his destiny on the wheel of life, come what may.
On his return trip through western China,
Xuanzang anxiously awaited word from Emperor Taizong.
How would he receive the monk
who flagrantly disobeyed him half a lifetime ago?
At Dunhaung's 'Caves of a Thousand Buddhas' Xuanzang paused,
probably to let monks copy the scriptures he brought back from India.
While he waited, the holy man studied three centuries of painting
and sculpture in the cave's many rooms.
Little did he know that a record of his own epic journey
would someday join these sacred images.
Eventually word would come to the pilgrim
waiting on the lip of the Taklimakan Xuanzang was forgiven.
The Emperor Taizong said he wanted to talk to him.
And then, of course, he said to Xuanzang,
"Why did you go on this trip?"
Emperor Taizong at the very beginning
probably had a kind of utilitarian purpose in his mind
as he realized that someone who has spent so much time and energy
traveling through Central Asia to India had a great knowledge
about these regions and the region
that he always had a great political interest in.
Afterwards,
they gradually developed this kind of very close personal friendship.
The emperor invited the prodigal monk to be his foreign minister.
But Taizong would settle instead for a book
in which Xuanzang described each step of his remarkable journey.
There are plenty of bookworms in the world,
and there are lots of great trekkers,
and there are some good diplomats, and there are some devout Buddhists,
but he was all of them.
And I think he was a real man for all seasons.
The monk's last bit of uncommon good fortune was the emperor's friendship.
It permitted Xuanzang to spend the rest of his life as he wished,
translating the treasures he wagered his life to find.