chapter 4
Led by the village elders,
I saw the grave said to be the burial place of Tang Sanzang and his companions.
Forty years have passed, and now that burial mound is nothing more than a small heap of earth, barely half the height of a man.
There isn’t even a gravestone.
I asked them, aside from the monk from forty years ago,
has there truly not been a second monk passing through Twin Fork Ridge in all these years?
They shook their heads, all saying that I was the second.
I hadn’t expected to receive such an answer so soon after leaving Chang’an.
I hesitated, unsure whether I should continue westward.
I asked the villagers if they knew what lay beyond Twin Fork Ridge, further to the west.
They said that would be the territory of the Tubo People, called the U-Tsang Kingdom.
U-Tsang Kingdom?
That name was very familiar to me.
I remembered that Gao Village, where Tang Sanzang subdued Zhu Bajie, was said to be in the U-Tsang Kingdom.
I asked them again if they knew where Gao Village was.
A young man, who claimed to do business on the border, heard my question and suddenly laughed.
He said, “Monk, you must be joking. How could there be a Han village in the territory of the Tubo People?”
The young man’s words startled me again.
But on second thought, he was right.
Gao Village sounds like a Han village-how could it exist in the land of the Tubo People?
Could it be that Zhu Bajie was also a fabrication?
“If you want to go, I’ll be heading to the U-Tsang Kingdom in a few days to purchase goods. I could take you along to ask around.”
The young man said.
I thought it over and agreed.
The young man said his name was Meng Shui, and that his family had lived as border people for generations.
He brought tea from the interior to trade there for horses, cattle, and sheep, then sold those animals to the officers of the Hezhou Guard to make a living.
Meng Shui also said he had been doing Han-Tubo border trade for over ten years.
He truly had never heard of Gao Village.
So I asked him if he knew about Tang Sanzang and his disciples on their Journey to the West for Scriptures.
Meng Shui thought for a moment and said he’d heard a bit-Tang Sanzang and his disciples were all remarkable people.
I didn’t tell him that the monk buried behind their village, killed by bandits forty years ago, was the famous Tang Sanzang.