[Buddha-l] In the footsteps of Xuan Zhang

[Stephen Hodge]

Joanna wrote:

> This is really intriguing...........I wonder what it was about India that 
> caused so much mortality. The climate? Did any of your reports speculate 
> as to the reasons?
As far as anything is mentioned, mainly disease and snake-bites were the 
main causes of death.  I wonder if there were diseases indigenous to India 
but rare or unknown in China to which the Chinese pilgrims had little or no 
resistance.  Yijing mentions brief bigraphical details of Chinese monks who 
went to India around the same time as he was living there.  There are about 
64 of them and almost 60 had died or gone missing never to be heard of again 
by the time Yijing left India.

After the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the subsequent flow of refugees into 
India, many of those Tibetans fell sick with TB to which they had not 
previously been exposed.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge