Journeys to the West
Between 399 and 695 CE, three monks walked and sailed out of China to reach India — the land their scriptures called the West. They crossed the river of sand and the Onion Mountains, rode the monsoon past Sumatra, and wrote down everything: the monasteries and their schools, the stūpas and their stories, the kingdoms and their kings. This site rebuilds their world from their own words.
What the records hold
Two hundred and ten recorded visits. One hundred and sixty-six stories — jātakas, miracles, relics and remembered history. Seven holy places witnessed by all three pilgrims across three centuries, from Nālandā’s lecture halls to the Bodhi Tree itself, so you can watch a single monastery change across three hundred years.
The map shows where the Mahāyāna and the Śrāvakayāna flourished, which schools kept which monasteries, and how far the pilgrims’ own eyes reached — every claim traceable to a verbatim line of the source text.