Page:Footfalls of Indian History.djvu/195

THE CHINESE PILGRIM 149 "Fa-Hian, having purchased in the new town perfumes, flowers, and oil lamps, hired two aged bhikshus to conduct him to the grots and to the hill Khi-che. Having made an oblation of the perfumes and the flowers, the lamps increased the brilliance. Grief and emotion affected him even to tears. He said: 'Formerly in this very place was Buddha. Here he taught the Sheou-leng-yan.^ Fa-Hian, unable to behold Buddha in life, has but witnessed the traces of his sojourn. Still, it is something to have recited the Sheou-leng-yan before the cave, and to have dwelt there one night.' "

But Fa-Hian, enthusiast as he was, and capable of extreme exertions in the cause of the Faith and China, was not this alone. There was also in that grave and modest nature a chord that vibrated to the thought of home. "He longed ardently," he says, when he had already reached the South of China, " to see Chhang'^in again, but, that which he had at heart being a weighty matter, he halted in the South where the masters published the Sacred Books and the Precepts." Thus he excuses himself for a brief delay on the way back to his native province. But if he feels thus when he has already landed on Chinese shores, what must have been his longing while still in foreign lands? In Ceylon, seated before the blue jasper image of Buddha, perhaps at Anuradhapura, he pauses to tell us:—

"Many years had now elapsed since Fa-Hian left the land of Han. The people with 'whom he

1 The things which are difficult to discriniinii'e from one another.