Wang ocheonchukguk jeon
| Korean spelling | |
|---|---|
| Korean alphabet : | 왕오 천축국 전 |
| Hanja : | 往 五 天竺 國 傳 |
| Revised Romanization : | Wang ocheonchukguk jeon |
| McCune-Reischauer : | Wang ochʼŏnchʼukguk jŏn |
Wang ocheonchukguk jeon is a travelogue of the Korean Buddhist monk Hyecho , who traveled through India from AD 723 to AD 727/728 . The work was written in Old Chinese and is one of the great Buddhist travelogues.
It is the Korean transliteration of the Chinese word Chinese 往 五 天竺 國 傳 , Pinyin wǎng wǔ tiān zhú guó chuán . It is a compound word made up of wang (왕, „:" to travel through "), o (오, 五:" five "), cheonchuk (천축, 天竺:" India "), guk (국, 國:" country ") and jeon (전, 傳: "narrative, report"). That means "travelogue about five Indian countries". “Five Countries of India” does not refer to states, but to areas of India . The author names these countries simply by cardinal points: East, West, South, North and Central India. This designation was common in China and Korea and arose because the subcontinent India was too large for the geographical understanding of the time and little known to foreigners to precisely localize the borders of individual countries.
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)