Hyecho

Korean spelling
Hangeul	혜초
Hanja	慧 超 / 惠 超
Revised Romanization	Hyecho
McCune- Reischauer	Hyech'o
See also : Korean name

Hyecho (* 704 ; † 787 ; 혜초 [hjecʰo] , Chinese  慧 超 , Pinyin Huìchāo , W.-G. Hui-ch'ao ) was a Korean Buddhist monk from the Silla kingdom . He was one of many monks who made the pilgrimage to India. Most of them were often killed on the way or were simply lost. But Hyecho was one of the few who were successful in such an undertaking.

Although he was born in the Silla kingdom , he went to Guangzhou , China (then under the rule of the Tang Dynasty ) as a 16-year-old Buddhist novice to study Buddhist teachings. There he is said to have met a monk of the then Vajrayana Buddhism who had come to China from India. This encounter is said to have aroused in him curiosity and thirst for knowledge about the true or hidden teaching of the Buddha. One reason why many monks made pilgrimages to the Buddha's homeland at that time.

In 723, just 19 years old, Hyecho traveled by ship to India from the very south of Guangzhou . It is believed that the voyage was along the coast of the South Asian countries and that Hyecho landed in the Calcutta area . After four years (723 - 727/8) of exploring India, he returned through the Silk Road (the Pamir Mountains) to the capital of the Tang dynasty Chang'an (now Xi'an ).

His journey in north-west India and Central Asia took place in the time of rising Islam. This was similar to that of Faxian , a Chinese monk who had also traveled to this region three centuries earlier.

Upon returning, he wrote a travelogue called Wang ocheonchukguk jeon (往 五 天竺 國 傳). When it was written cannot be said with certainty. Hyecho was mainly busy with translations of the Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into Chinese. It is said that he entered the Wutai Shan Monastery in 780 to continue his translation work. He died there in 787. It is not known that he would have ever seen his native Korea again.

Part of Wang ocheonchukguk jeon was discovered by the French orientalist Paul Pelliot in 1908 in cave 17 of the Dunhuang Buddhist monastery . A German translation was made by the German sinologist Walter Fuchs . A team of Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Canadian scientists translated the work into English. In addition to the works of Faxian , Song Yun (宋云) and Huisheng (惠 生), Xuanzang and Yi Jing, it is one of the great Buddhist travel reports.

Remarks

1. ↑ Lamaism , which has become widely known today, is a branch of Vajrayana Buddhism

Works

• 往 五 天竺 國 傳 (Original in Chinese)
• The Hye Ch'o Diary: Memoir of the Pilgrimage to the Five Regions of India. ISBN 0895810247 ( UNESCO Collection of Representative Works )

literature

• W. Fuchs : "Huei-ch'ao's pilgrimage through Northwest India and Central Asia around 726," special edition from the session reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Phil.-hist. Class XXX (1938)