Sketch of History of Turkestan 267
the Chinese, who disperse them and follow the newly opened way westward to conquer a country, East Turkestan, which had first been conquered by those whom the Hueng-nu had dispossessed. This country had received Buddhist missionaries, who convert the victorious Chinese, adding many millions to those who believe that Gautama found the great Deliverance through the great Renunciation. In a little while the intimate coming and going through Kashgaria is interrupted ; China loses its hold, but the seed is sown ; and in 399, 318, and 629 A.D. Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Fa-hien, Song-Yang, and Weng T'sang, respectively, pass through Turkestan to visit Indian shrines made sacred to them through knowledge of the Teacher, and leave to curious generations such scant knowledge of the country as the troubled times permitted. Meanwhile, ere the first of these pilgrims had set his face westward, Christianity had mounted the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire ; and while Weng T'sang was drinking his soul's fill at fountain-spots of Buddhist worship, his own Emperor was courteously receiving a Christian missionary at the national capital. Nor had Mohammedanism yet uttered its world-wide cry, the Prophet being still but a struggling Arab preacher. But the centuries which had passed since the words of the Meditative One had been carried over the Himalayas, from oasis to oasis, and across the wide desert to China's heart, had now given to Gautama's memory a veneration which their successors have not yet destroyed.
The Christian missionaries have in later days
IIIF Color HighRes
