Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back - on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on
foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645,
Mountains and deserts,
In search of the Truth
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
And he found it.
㋡
Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
in failure, he thought, and suffering.
- Charles Wright
from Body and Soul II
A Short History of the Shadow
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
