A RECORD OF BUDDHISTIC KINGDOMS

Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hien of his Travels in
India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of
Discipline

Translated and annotated with a Corean recension of the Chinese text

BY

JAMES LEGGE




PREFACE

Several times during my long residence in Hong Kong I endeavoured to
read through the "Narrative of Fa-hien;" but though interested with
the graphic details of much of the work, its columns bristled so
constantly--now with his phonetic representations of Sanskrit words,
and now with his substitution for them of their meanings in Chinese
characters, and I was, moreover, so much occupied with my own special
labours on the Confucian Classics, that my success was far from
satisfactory. When Dr. Eitel's "Handbook for the Student of Chinese
Buddhism" appeared in 1870, the difficulty occasioned by the Sanskrit
words and names was removed, but the other difficulty remained; and I
was not able to look into the book again for several years. Nor had I
much inducement to do so in the two copies of it which I had been able
to procure, on poor paper, and printed from blocks badly cut at first,