60 Part I: Land and Language
India in search of texts; 200 years earlier, Faxian made a similar journey, also to
collect texts and visit the sites associated with the Buddha, and he left an impor-
tant record of this journey.) Crossing through the thirsty wastes of the great cen-
tral deserts, endangered by bandits but also aided by devout rulers, Xuanzang
finally reached India. There he visited all the major Buddhist sites and spent
five years at Nalanda learning Sanskrit and studying the Buddhist texts.
In India, Xuanzang found the Indian method of bookmaking remarkable.
Indians wrote on palm leaves and strung the leaves together on a string. Two
types of palms, talipat and palmyra, were suitable (in Southeast Asia, the lontar
palm is also used). Each leaf had to be cut from its central spine, trimmed to
size, boiled in milk or water several times, and finally rubbed smooth with a
cowry shell or stone. They could be written on with ink or incised with a stylus,
and the type of writing implement affected the emergence of scripts, as we shall
see. The disadvantage of palm leaves is their vulnerability to humidity and
insects, which is why very few palm-leaf manuscripts older than the sixteenth
century exist. They require tremendous care; they are kept wrapped in cloth
when not in use and have to be recopied frequently. They have survived better in
dry climates outside India and Southeast Asia. In 608, 22 years before Xuan-
zang left for India, a Japanese envoy brought an Indian palmyra leaf text that he
had acquired from Sui dynasty (China) to Japan, and it is still there, the oldest in
existence (Tanabe 1988). The fragility of texts probably contributed to the Bud-Indian palm leaf book in Malayalam script, similar to those seen by Xuanzang in the sev-
enth century C.E.