Song Yun or Songyun ( & 520s) was a Chinese

Buddhist Buddhism, also known as Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and List of philosophies, philosophical tradition based on Pre-sectarian Buddhism, teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or ...

monk who travelled to medieval India from the Tuoba

Northern Wei Wei (), known in historiography as the Northern Wei ( zh, c=北魏, p=Běi Wèi), Tuoba Wei ( zh, c=拓跋魏, p=Tuòbá Wèi), Yuan Wei ( zh, c=元魏, p=Yuán Wèi) and Later Wei ( zh, t=後魏, p=Hòu Wèi), was an Dynasties of China, impe ...

kingdom during

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

's Northern and Southern dynastic period at the behest of the Empress Hu. He and his companions Huisheng, Fali, and Zheng or Wang Fouze left the Wei capital

Luoyang Luoyang ( zh, s=洛阳, t=洛陽, p=Luòyáng) is a city located in the confluence area of the Luo River and the Yellow River in the west of Henan province, China. Governed as a prefecture-level city, it borders the provincial capital of Zheng ...

on foot in 518 and returned in the winter of 522 with 170 Buddhist scriptures. Song and Hui's accounts of their journey are now lost but much of their information was preserved in other texts.

Life

Knowledge of Song Yun's bibliography is known primarily from sources derived from the accounts of the journey written by Song and his companion Huisheng or analysis of those sources. He was originally from Dunhuang. Surviving accounts of his journey to India vary in various details. According to the reconstruction of the trip by Édouard Chavannes, :Huisheng nd the otherswere sent in the 11th day of the second month of the second Zhengui year (518); he and his companions arrived in Karghalik on the 29th day of the 7th month of the 2nd Zhengui year (519); in the second ten days of the ninth month, they met the king of the

Hephthalites The Hephthalites (), sometimes called the White Huns (also known as the White Hunas, in Iranian languages, Iranian as the ''Spet Xyon'' and in Sanskrit and Prakrit as the ''Sveta-huna''), were a people who lived in Central Asia during the 5th to ...

; at the beginning of the 11th month, they arrived in Bosi or Boji (southwest of Wakhan); in the second ten days of this same month, they entered Chitral and at the beginning of the 12th month they entered Udyana. Then, during the second ten days of the fourth month of the first Chengkuang year (520), they arrived in Gandhara. They stayed two years in Udyana and Gandhara until returning at the beginning of the third Chengkuang year (522), (and not the second year as one reads in the Account)." According to legend, they returned through the Congling (or "Onion") Mountains where Song Yun met the celebrated Damo or Bodhidharma who had died recently at

. Song Yun took the Qinghai Route via Xining, past Qinghai Lake and through the Qaidam depression, probably joining the main Southern Silk Route near Shanshan/ Loulan. The route at the time was under the control of the Tuyuhun (Tibetan: ' Azha) people. They seem to have travelled to India along the difficult southern branch of the Silk Routes from Dunhuang to Yutian (Khotan) along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, to the north of the Congling Mountains, and then crossed the mountains as Faxian had done before them. After passing through Wakhan, they met with the king of the

, who had taken over the lands previously controlled by the

Yuezhi The Yuezhi were an ancient people first described in China, Chinese histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu, during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defea ...

and had recently conquered Gandhara. He was apparently on tour at the time near the entrance to the Wakhan Corridor and not at his capital city Badiyan (Bâdhaghìs) which was near modern Herat in western Afghanistan. The king, who had control over more than forty kingdoms, prostrated twice and received an Imperial edict from the Northern Wei Dynasty on his knees. Song Yun and his companions then travelled through Chitral and met the kings of the Swat Valley or Udyana.

Works

Song and one of his companions, Huisheng, both wrote accounts of their journey, but they have since disappeared. His work is known as the ''Itinerary'', ''Travels'', or ''Travel Record of Songyun'' ). Fortunately, much valuable information about their journey has been preserved in ''Luoyang qielan ji'', by Yang Xuanzhi, and in other texts. There are some minor discrepancies among the surviving sources as to the exact dates of the journey and the names of the people who made the trip together.

References

Citations

Bibliography

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External links