In the time of I-Ching, there were many longwindedly named Chinese Buddhist monks who set out on long, arduous travels to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, in search of a greater understanding and to translate Buddhist text and bring it back to China. These travels went along the Silk Trade Route which went both to the north and to the south of the desert area by the T’ien-shan Mountains, passing from China, through Tibet and over to India. Many times, throughout the course of a monk’s journey, they would have to deal with very adverse conditions. Encountering robbers or nomadic people in Tibet seemed to be a common occurrence and to anyone without a great will and desire to practice and learn Buddhism these types of encounters would very easily make one wish to turn around. It is very likely that events like robberies were recorded precisely to illustrate the dedication of a given monk and to preserve that dedication for future Buddhists.

The writing style is very frank, so this preservation is done just by listing what happened and not by making a play to play, detailed commentary of each specific robbery. All that is said is that a monk was robbed and captured and later escaped or did not escape. While peculiar to the way one might write about a terrifying occurrence today, I-Ching’s historical account of the monks and what happened to them seems fitting for his purposes and to the religion he wrote about. The writing is more of a militaristic record of soldiers’ whereabouts and conditions, not a journalistic, wordy biography. Perhaps, flowing with Buddhist tradition, the clear and concise format is an exercise in being mindful of the emptiness of the material world, an exercise in being careful not to get wrapped up and lost in the sensory details and yet to still see the relevance of encounters within that same sensory world.

This hypothesis of course is acceptable in describing and analyzing the first portion of the reading but it seems the second half is much different and further explanation is needed. In fact, the second half is painstakingly detailed about the living arrangements in some famous monasteries, like Nalanda. To account for this and still say that I-Ching wrote rather dry but concise accounts, the motivation of which being based on Buddhist notions of emptiness, it is possible to claim that the latter half was full of lengthy description because of the subject matter.

To write about the colour of leaves and the feel of the sand in the desert areas is irrelevant to a Buddhist religious text. However, to tediously describe wall paint colours and shapes and layouts and the processes of rule making in a sangha is to describe that which was religiously important. If the accounts were meant to be records of Buddhism in China and India at the time of I-Ching and were to be passed forward to future generations of Buddhists, then to ensure a standard of quality and to uphold the current Buddhist tradition but still write in a way that abides by Buddhist doctrine, it is absolutely necessary to withhold inconsequential details of a particular travel. It is necessary to include only the relevant landscape description so as to get the message of how hard the trips were and how much dedication was needed, but conversely, to include as much detail as possible about Buddhist practices and modes of living.

Beyond the historical accounts of landscape and traditions, another area of historical importance is relevant and written about by I-Ching – international relations on a political level. The records of relations between China, India and Tibet, Indian kings inviting Chinese monks to stay in India, high royalty funding trips to foreign lands for herbs and aiding the monks on their journeys speak of the influence Buddhism had in the Eastern world at the time. It seems as though Buddhist monks were highly respected in India and were given much aid and opportunity to spread the Buddhist message even further.

Again, in keeping with a bare minimum writing style, information about who invited monks over and what monks did on their journey and upon arrival is kept very straight forward.
e.g.-
This king invited this monk to India.
That monk went.
He passed through this monastery and stayed for 2 years.
He was deeply skilled in translation.
He went to another monastery.
He died at thirty odd years.
-End of story.
However sparse the account is in word count though, politically it describes a lot. It describes which country is welcoming to Buddhism, where large Buddhist centers were and what happened within those centers (at the time, it seems there was a lot of translation work of sutras and sastras).

What I find interesting is that compared to just reading the text, by analyzing the writing style itself on top of reading all the facts, an even greater understanding of Buddhism as a whole can be reached; a more conceptual understanding. Not only did I-Ching succeed in passing historical fact about Buddhism to the future but by looking into his writing style and the motivations behind it, he passed on Buddhist teaching. Of course, that could have been his plan all along and the frank records were not factual accounts at all but just tools to force the reader to dig deeper.