On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India, 629–645 A.D. v1.c15.10

v1.c15.10

The terms rendered in this passage by "capital" and "palace-city" are respectively tu-ch'êng (都城) and kung-ch'êng (宮城). But by the term tu-ch'êng here we are to understand "the district of the capital", what is called in other books "the Śrāvastī country" as distinguished from "the Kosala country". Kung-ch'êng here is taken by Julien to mean "the palace", and by Beal to mean "the walls enclosing the royal precincts". But we must take the term in this passage to denote "the walled city of Śrāvastī". That this is its meaning in our text is clear from what follows, and from the corresponding passages in the Life and the Fang-chih, and the description in the Fo-kuo-chi. In these treatises the words tu, tu-ch'êng, and ch'êng, all used in the sense of capital, are the equivalents of our pilgrim's kung-ch'êng. His usual term for the chief city of a country is tu-tu-ch'êng, and he seems to use tu-ch'êng here in a peculiar sense. It has been suggested by a learned and intelligent native scholar that the tu-ch'êng of this passage denotes the towns and cities of Kosala which were inferior and subordinate to the capital, the kung-ch'êng. The tu-ch'êng of ancient China were the cities which were the official residences of the subordinate feudal chiefs whose sovereign reigned at the royal capital. According to this interpretation the pilgrim states that the other cities of the country were in such utter de-