Yi Jing

• Chinese: 義淨 (Yìjìng)

Yi Jing was a Chinese Buddhist monk of the 7th century who made a pilgrimage to India via marine routes, leaving one of the only surviving accounts of certain parts of maritime Southeast Asia of that time.

Though other Buddhist monks had previously traveled to India overland, Yi Jing was among a very few (perhaps the first) to make the journey by sea. He departed from Guangzhou on a Persian ship, sailing south to Sumatra, and from there to India. His descriptions of Palembang, a Buddhist center on Sumatra in the Srivijaya Empire, are particularly valuable to scholars today.

References

• Matt Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, Cambridge University Press (2012), 33.