The once tree-lined avenues of the Grand Trunk Road in Haryana are now flanked by sprawling dhabas, forever teeming with visitors. Not all of them are travellers—many drive over a hundred kilometres on a Sunday, lured by what is now termed as ‘highway tourism’.
But our destination was of a more contemplative kind. Past Karnal, we exited National Highway 44. Before us, the wheat fields stretched out—recently harvested, their golden stubble shimmering under the April sun.
This fertile Yamuna basin, renowned for its high-grade basmati rice, is now home to one of India’s most celebrated single malts: Indri. But we were headed 40 kilometres further, in search of something deeper for the spirit.
Our first stop was Topra Kalan, a quiet village in Yamunanagar district. Tranquil and unassuming today, it once stood near Sugh—the ancient city of Shrughna—chronicled in the seventh century by the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang.
In his travelogue, Xuanzang described Shrughna, then part of the Kuru kingdom, as a thriving spiritual centre with five monasteries housing a thousand monks: “They deliberate and discuss in appropriate language, and their clear discourses embody profound truth. Men of different regions of eminent skill discuss with them to satisfy their doubts. There are a hundred Deva temples…. Outside the east gate, towards the river and to the southeast of the city, there was a stupa built by Ashoka on the spot where Buddha had preached his doctrine. Beside it stood another stupa containing hair and nails of the Buddha; and all around, to the right and to the left, there were many dozens of stupas containing relics of holy men, such as Sariputra and Moggalayan, the Buddha’s key disciples.”
The Kuru kingdom is broadly identified with the region around Thanesar, its capital Indraprastha believed to be near present-day Delhi. It was here that the Buddha is said to have delivered some of his most profound sermons, including the Mahasatipatthana Sutta, the discourse on the four foundations of mindfulness that has shaped modern Buddhist practice, particularly in the west.
Today, the Ashokan stupa Xuanzang saw at Sugh is gone. But the Ashokan pillar that once stood at Topra Kalan was moved 200 kilometres away, to Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla. In the 14th century, Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq had it transported—wrapped in silk and cotton—along the Yamuna to his palace, where he reinstalled it as the Minar-e-Zareen, the Pillar of Gold. Over centuries, the pillar acquired a layered identity: a relic of imperial ambition, a site of spiritual belief in djinns, and more recently, a cultural symbol.
It was this very pillar that Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked in his inaugural speech at the G20 Summit in Delhi, quoting its ancient inscription (stanzas 4-5) to welcome the world’s leaders: “Hevam lokasa hita-sukhe ti, ath iyam naatisu hevam”—the welfare and happiness of humanity should always be ensured.
Back in Topra Kalan, the memory of the pillar endures. The villagers have erected a modern 30ft-tall Dharma Chakra as a symbolic return to their ancient Buddhist legacy.
With me was Deepak Anand—a calm, deliberate presence—researcher, heritage guide, and one of the few people in India to have retraced Xuanzang’s journey on foot. His work has brought long-forgotten Buddhist sites back into public consciousness. Deepak’s journey is more than a pilgrimage; it is a resuscitation of stories, spiritual and cultural, that once resonated in this land. He was leading our way.
In 2020, guided primarily by Xuanzang’s text, he undertook a 3,000-kilometre trek across several Indian states and Nepal, concluding at Nalanda.
Xuanzang was a seventh-century Chinese monk who came to India in search of the original teachings of the Buddha. His expedition, spanning 16,000 kilometres, took him through the Gobi Desert and across the Hindu Kush, until he finally reached Nalanda. He spent 16 years in the Indian subcontinent, learning Sanskrit and Pali, practising Yogacarabhumi-sastra and other Mahayana texts under Buddhist masters, and visiting sites associated with the Buddha. When he returned to China, he carried with him 657 manuscripts in 520 cases, 150 Buddha relics, and a caravan of 100 porters, 72 horses, and an elephant—on which he rode.
His return took two years. The Chinese welcomed him as a hero; people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the monk who had returned with a spiritual treasure.
Xuanzang presented his observations to the Tang emperor in a magnum opus: Da Tang Xiyu Ji (Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang Dynasty). It became the most detailed written account of India from that era—encyclopaedic in its descriptions of people, beliefs, climates, flora and philosophical traditions.
He documented caste divisions, legal systems and even medical customs. “If someone fell ill,” he wrote, “he fasted for seven days.” Punishment was nonviolent. “When laws are broken, the matter is sifted and the offenders imprisoned. There is no corporal punishment; they are simply left to live or die, and are not counted among men.”
Xuanzang provided, in Deepak’s words, “the finest, most authentic record of India from that period”. “He came 1,100 years after the Buddha’s death, when Buddhism was among the prominent philosophies. His observations have become invaluable historical documents,” he said.
By Xuanzang’s time, the Buddha was already represented in human form. For the first 500 years after his death, the Buddha had been represented through symbols—an umbrella, footprints, the Dharma Chakra or the Bodhi tree. His image started to appear with the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, especially in the Gandhara school (with Greco-Roman features) and the Mathura school (with indigenous elements), where Buddha appears with a topknot called ushnisha.
Born in 602 CE, Xuanzang grew up in a Confucian and Buddhist household. He became a monk at 20 and, by 27, defied an imperial ban on foreign travel. Xuanzang would go on to influence the spread of Mahayana Buddhism in China and become an icon of devotion and scholarly rigour.
In India, however, his legacy was largely forgotten until the 19th-century western orientalist movement. French scholar Stanislas Julien’s translation of Xuanzang’s work in 1853 proved foundational for Alexander Cunningham, the father of Indian archaeology. Cunningham used it to locate and excavate key Buddhist sites—Nalanda, Sarnath, Sankissa, Sravasti and others—and identified present-day Sugh as Xuanzang’s Shrughna.
Most of the stupas Xuanzang described no longer exist, but his words endure. He arrived 1,100 years after the Buddha, following the trail of Ashokan edicts and pillars erected 200 years after the Enlightened One. Cunningham retraced Xuanzang’s path 1,200 years later. Now, Deepak walks the same route, 1,400 years on.
“I wanted to identify the places that were part of the Buddha’s charika—the path of his wanderings,” Deepak said. “Today, only eight sites are officially recognised in the Buddhist circuit. My effort is to help rediscover and revive others mentioned by Xuanzang.”
Raised in a defence personnel’s house in Bihar, Deepak followed a path that was not unconventional—he studied instrumentation and control engineering, earned an MBA, and worked with a few NGOs. But, over time, he found his calling in something esoteric. Through a solitary but extensive journey across ancient Buddhist geographies, he blended archaeology, spiritual mapping and historical recovery. His meticulously documented journeys have begun to stir interest in Buddhist circles, even though the stamp of approval from academia is still to come.
After months of conversations over phone, we finally met the day before what was Xuanzang’s 1,423th birth anniversary. Deepak—6’3”, lean, dressed in cargos and a T-shirt, with a cap completing the look of an intrepid traveller—had made Xuanzang his life’s mission. Through him, we rediscovered the ancient monk himself.
Deepak has spent more than two decades studying Buddhist heritage. What began as curiosity—sparked by reading Sun Shuyun’s Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud—became a personal pilgrimage. Xuanzang’s Da Tang Xiyu Ji is more than history for him; it is a living guide. He pored over Cunningham’s reports, archaeological papers, and travelogues of past explorers, before adding something new: using GIS mapping and topographical data to plot Xuanzang’s journey.
And then, like the monk, he began to walk.
Deepak Anand began at Adi Badri, a little-known archaeological site with Buddhist roots that the Haryana government recently promoted as the origin of the mythical river Saraswati. With a backpack containing only two T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and a bedsheet, he took his first step towards Topra Kalan.
There, we met Sidhartha Gauri, a fellow researcher who played a key role in installing an 8,500kg Dharma Chakra to commemorate the site’s significance. Sidhartha is now collaborating with the state government to develop a formal Buddhist circuit in Haryana. “I am convinced that Topra Kalan is Kamasdhamma—the place mentioned in Pali texts in the Kuru country where the Buddha delivered three of his major sermons: Mahasatipatthana, Magandiya and Mahanidana,” he said.
Deepak agrees. “Ashoka chose this place to erect a pillar transported from Chunar, a thousand kilometres away,” he said. “That says something.” A recent ground-penetrating study by IIT Kanpur suggests the presence of ancient structures beneath the surface.
Interestingly, decades ago, Vipassana pioneer S.N. Goenka had identified Kamasdhamma not at Topra but near Sonipat, over a hundred kilometres away. Goenka built a meditation centre there.
What Deepak is certain of is the stupa Xuanzang described in Sugh. Today, a mound lies buried under a house in Amadalpur village. The property belongs to Valerie Hara, a Canadian who married Jat Sikh farmer Surinder Hara, whom she met in Geneva more than 30 years ago. Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, once visited their farm to study its sustainable practices combining agriculture, forestry and horticulture.
Valerie greeted us warmly. “I wanted a Jat Sikh identity,” she said of her adopted surname. She pointed to a swimming pool they had dug. “While building it,” she said, “we found terracotta toys and odd weights.”
Deepak believes this site is linked to the Buddha’s teachings. While the claim remains unverified, he persuaded Valerie to allow Buddhist monks to visit. “I felt peaceful hearing them chant,” she said. “They are always welcome.”
According to Deepak, the descriptions from Xuanzang’s account closely match the location of this mound.
And mounds—heaps of earth, hiding lost civilisations—are a recurring marker in our travels with Deepak. In India, such unremarkable mounds have revealed wonders. Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Rakhigarhi and Nalanda—all began as mounds.
Along the walking route, Deepak has been quietly cultivating a network of local volunteers and heritage enthusiasts dedicated to preserving India’s buried Buddhist legacy. His efforts are now supported by a heritage initiative of the Nava Nalanda Mahavihara, a deemed university under the Union government in Nalanda. “Xuanzang’s life is a template for cultural diplomacy at its finest,” said Prof Siddharth Singh, vice chancellor of Nava Nalanda Mahavihara. “He was neither an emissary of state power nor an agent of empire; he was a seeker, mediator and bridge-builder.”
Deepak’s ‘discoveries’ would need archaeological validation. So far, across this corner of Haryana, there were only scattered references to Buddhist archaeology—faint yet evocative. But the most striking symbol of the region’s Buddhist past stands some 20 kilometres from Topra Kalan, in a village called Chaneti.
There, hidden behind a row of modest houses, stands a mesmerising brick stupa—a relic from another era. It stands with the quiet poise of antiquity, matching the height of nearby single-storey homes. The baked-brick construction—concentric layers, carefully laid—evokes a hemispherical form. Niches carved into its surface may once have housed votive images or relics. There were traces of candles and burnt oil lamps, indicating that worshippers were returning.
“This stupa at Chaneti must have been one of the ‘tens of stupas’ referred to by Xuanzang,” reads the official description. “To construct this baked brick stupa, concentric layers were placed one atop the other, each time leaving a slight offset, creating a hemispherical form. This stupa corresponds to the Shahpur and Dharmarajika stupas at Taxila.”
The stupa seemed to quietly complete our journey through Haryana—a land now tied to three foundational histories: the Indus Valley, via Rakhigarhi; the Mahabharata, through Kurukshetra; and the Buddha’s sojourns among the “knowledgeable people” of the Kuru realm.
The Buddha was born more than 2,600 years ago in Lumbini, present-day Nepal, as Prince Siddhartha Gautama. In his twenties, he renounced his palace, his wife, and his infant son to seek the truth behind human suffering. After years of asceticism and deep meditation, he attained enlightenment beneath a pipal tree in Bodh Gaya. From that moment, Siddhartha became the Buddha—the awakened one.
For the next 45 years, he walked the Gangetic plains, teaching a radical yet simple message: suffering arises from craving, and it can be ended by following the Eightfold Path—a practice rooted in ethics, mindfulness and wisdom. His teachings, passed down orally, spread rapidly, especially with the support of powerful patrons like Emperor Ashoka, who dispatched emissaries as far as Sri Lanka and Central Asia. In later centuries, Sunga, Kushan, Gupta and Pala dynasties patronised Buddhism.
The religion flourished. Monasteries across Bihar and Uttar Pradesh became hubs of learning. Great institutions like Nalanda and Vikramashila nurtured Buddhist scholarship. Over time, Buddhism splintered into various schools—Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana—and travelled along the trade routes into Southeast Asia, Tibet and, most significantly, China.
Trade felicitated social and cultural exchange over centuries. In fact, in 2014, when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India, he bonded with Modi over their shared link to Xuanzang: the monk had stayed in Vadnagar, Modi’s birthplace, and spent his final year in Xi’an, Xi’s hometown. Xuanzang called Vadnagar O-nan-to-pu-lo in his records. “There are some ten sangharamas with fewer than 1,000 monks,” he wrote. “They follow the Hinayana school and adhere to the Sammatiya tradition.”
That bilateral meeting led to the joint film Xuanzang, produced by renowned filmmaker Wong Kar-wai in 2016.
Xuanzang’s travelogue remains the most elaborate and reliable account of early medieval India. His descriptions of Kanauj, Varanasi, Pataliputra and Shrughna not only captured architecture and rituals, but also the subcontinent’s cultural, spiritual and political life. His precision—measuring distances in li (roughly 350 metres)—has led some scholars to speculate about a covert geopolitical agenda linked to Tang ambitions in Central Asia. Xuanzang’s journey, writes historian William Dalrymple, was “one of the richest moments of cultural and philosophical interactions in world history”.
When Deepak began his walk in February 2020, the chill of a North Indian winter still lingered as spring stirred the fields to life. He covered 30 kilometres a day, carrying only minimal clothing. “I kept a sachet of tomato sauce in my bag,” he said. “That way, I could eat anything.” He often found shelter in temples and meals from generous strangers. “In rural areas, the age-old tradition of welcoming and feeding a traveller on a spiritual mission still exists,” he said.
As Deepak walked, the world changed. A virus originating in China brought life to a standstill. He was forced to pause in Sankissa, a town in UP where the Buddha is believed to have descended from heaven. Today, Sankissa is one of the eight principal Buddhist pilgrimage sites—along with Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, Sravasti, Lumbini, Kushinagar, Vaishali, and Rajgir. Both the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh have delivered sermons here.
By the time the lockdown lifted, summer had arrived. “I used to start walking at 2:30am and continue until 7:30, then resume after 3:30pm,” he recalled. “I got blisters, even lost toenails. But I kept walking.” The only ‘nuisance’ he faced while walking these odd hours were dogs who challenged the unannounced visitor. “I found a way to tackle them,” he said. “Respond with authority, and they would back off.”
After Haryana, Deepak guided us through UP and Bihar. We saw him climb nameless mounds, consult elderly farmers, listen to village priests, and study the land with near-mystical familiarity. His GIS maps seemed committed to memory.
“Most archaeologists here follow Cunningham,” Deepak said, with some disappointment. “But Cunningham never came to these places. Xuanzang did.”
In Chintamani village, near the perfume capital of Kannauj, we found a broken Buddha statue by the roadside. “Last time I came here, it was lying under a tree,” Deepak said. Three years later, it had been placed on a cement platform alongside other broken idols. Still unclaimed, but now treated with reverence.
Around Kannauj, we visited other villages—Dhaelpur, Gumtiya, Bhagwantpur—where ancient bricks jutted from fields. Locals referred to them as qilas (forts). Deepak speculated that many Buddhist sites may have been absorbed or replaced by later Brahminical shrines. “Xuanzang mentioned temples and monasteries here,” he said. “A detailed archaeological study could confirm the truth.”
It was in Kannauj that Xuanzang met King Harshavardhana, then the most powerful ruler in northern India. The monk wrote that Harsha hosted a 23-day religious assembly in his honour. While some scholars suspect exaggeration, the encounter remains a fascinating window into the spiritual politics of the time. Harsha’s court even established diplomatic ties with China, thanks to Xuanzang’s influence.
In Khamboli—a Buddha charika site mentioned by Xuanzang, in neighbouring Unnao district—Deepak showed us a mound with exposed bricks—three inches thick, which he said indicated the Kushana period. In Bhagwantpur, near the Yamuna Expressway, history had been completely erased. “When I first came here, the bricks were exposed,” he said. “Now they have been plastered over.” Green and saffron flags fluttered from rooftops—signs of newer faith-based battles.
Parveen Kushwaha, a local schoolteacher and our guide, said the land was being levelled for the Agra Expressway, and the bricks had to go. The villagers, he said, felt more relief than neglect. “Otherwise, we would have to remove them ourselves to farm,” he said. Deepak pointed to a small collection of artefacts—pottery shards, terracotta figurines, a woman’s coiffured head kept in the village temple. “In the past,” Kushwaha said, “this mound gave up coins, statues, even tools.”
And so it was, in village after village: relics lying by roadsides, idols broken and piled in temple courtyards, ancient stones mistaken for rubble. The past, in pieces, waiting to be heard.
When Xuanzang visited India, Buddhism was showing signs of decline. “The near disappearance of Buddhism from the plains of India is one of the most puzzling conundrums in the country’s history,” noted Buddhist scholar Prof K.T.S. Sarao. “At Bodh Gaya, Xuanzang saw the statue of Avalokiteshvara…. He found it sunk up to the chest, and estimated that it would be completely buried in about 150 to 200 years.... Xuanzang saw abandoned and derelict monasteries. By Xuanzang’s account, Buddhism had already fallen on bad days.”
In Jethian village, in Rajgir district, we encounter a rare reversal of this decline. There, in 1999, a submerged Buddha statue was unearthed, prompting villagers to build a shrine. This turned Jethian into a magnet for monks. “We welcomed hundreds of monks during the walks. The temple was built with Japanese support. Gold leaves shine over the black Buddha statue in this sacred setting,” said Dinesh, a local resident.
We were in Deepak’s home terrain—sacred ground walked by the Buddha, and retraced by our indefatigable guide. “The Jethian Valley has many sacred spots—Buddhavana, Asura Cave and Yashodharasthan,” he said. “This trail is now being developed as the Buddha Valley.”
In nearby Ayer-pathri village, we meet Ranvijay Singh, 80, who has turned his home into a private museum of terracotta shards and idols rescued from surrounding fields. “In 1973, I found a Buddha statue and gave it to the Nalanda district magistrate for the museum,” Singh said. “I have been collecting idols since 2013. I have never let anyone steal them.”
We saw a rock shelter near Ayer-pathri. The road leading to it gave way to a dirt track; the final stretch had to be walked. Children followed us as Deepak led like a modern-day pied piper. “There is a pond where the Buddha may have bathed,” a villager offered. We take it with a pinch of salt.
“This was the first site I discovered,” Deepak said as we scaled the hill. “I even brought Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and made him climb this hill.” Near the rock shelter, a Ladakhi monk had installed a new idol beside older, broken Buddha statues. The landscape below was idyllic—a layer of fog hung over palm trees—making the spot a natural meditation retreat.
Xuanzang had described a similar rock shelter above a nearby village. Today, the site has been rebranded Ayer Dham—a spiritual centre with growing footfalls and economic hope. If the Buddha is often seen through the lens of Ambedkarite politics in UP, he remains a native deity in Bihar, revered by all.
Deepak does not wait for official excavations to validate what the land whispers. At Dungeshwari Hills, formerly Pragbodhi, we visited a cave where the fasting Buddha is painted in gold, resembling the iconic Gandhara-style sculpture now housed in Lahore Museum.
This hill is significant. Xuanzang had noted that Ashoka had erected stupas here to mark the Bodhisattva’s footsteps. The stupas are damaged and no longer worshipped, but the legend lives on: it was here, on the fateful day of Vaishakh Purnima, that the Buddha-to-be arrived after receiving food from Sujata and deciding to reject extreme asceticism and follow the Middle Path. He left his shadow to appease the dragon of the cave and walked to the Bodhi Tree, where he finally attained enlightenment. Dungeshwari, renamed in the later medieval period, reflects how temples often replaced monasteries as Buddhism waned.
We conclude our journey in Nalanda—Xuanzang’s final and most important destination, and Deepak’s, too. When Xuanzang arrived here, 200 monks and a thousand lay supporters welcomed him with banners, flowers and incense. Today, in the nondescript Baragaon village, the ruins of the ancient university stand as a testament to the era gone by, when 2,000 teachers taught 10,000 monks subjects as varied as Buddhist philosophy, logic and grammar, and medicine, mathematics and astronomy.
As Deepak explored the ruins of this great seat of learning, monks followed him in a file, keeping their right shoulder aligned to the stupa as a mark of respect. It was here that Xuanzang spent years studying under the ageing Shilabadra, an exponent of Yogacara thought. The guru-shishya bond became a catalyst for the spread of Mahayana Buddhism to China.
“There is more awareness about Buddhism now,” said Mahathero, a Thai monk who has undertaken 40 vassa (rainy season retreats) in Nalanda. “Monks begin arriving in October. We are also training 40 Indian students.”
The only monument to Xuanzang is in Nalanda. A joint Indo-Chinese effort begun by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and premier Zhou Enlai in 1957, it was completed and inaugurated only in 2007. Crafted in Chinese architectural style, it rises in quiet magnificence, standing in sharp contrast to the modest buildings and the subdued surrounding landscape.
“I was here when this memorial was inaugurated,” said Deepak. “This was my first meeting with Xuanzang.” The government plans to house Xuanzang’s relics here.
At the site, we met a group of young men, some of them wearing turbans, from Punjab. “I discovered the Buddha after reading Ambedkar,” said Arvind, one of them. “I immediately applied to convert to Buddhism in Jalandhar.”
They bombarded Deepak with questions. “What about Pushyamitra Shunga’s role?” one asked—referring to the general who overthrew the last Mauryan king and performed the ritual of Ashvamedha yagna, marking the resurgence of vedic Hinduism.
The encounter was heartening. Their enthusiasm for rediscovering history evoked the very spirit of Xuanzang—inquiry, reverence and discovery.
No Buddhist journey is complete without visiting the Mahabodhi temple in Bodh Gaya. Beneath the canopy of the Bodhi tree—a descendent of the very tree under which Siddhartha attained enlightenment—Deepak revealed what he wanted to do next. Unmarried and with few family obligations, he said, he had the freedom to continue his life’s work. His next mission: to trace Xuanzang’s route across China, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, finally, Kashmir.
“However long it takes,” he said.
A REBEL WITH A CAUSE
WHEN XUANZANG left China, he defied an imperial travel ban (intended to stop people from joining insurgent groups on the western border). He was caught, but managed to escape. Thereafter, he hid during the day and travelled by night. He had to go through desert waste, guessing the way by the “trail of skeletons and horse dung”. Soon, he was caught again, but the captain in charge was a pious Buddhist and aided him, despite having received an order to arrest him.
HE’S THAT GUY
XUANZANG, MEANING ‘mysterious canon’ or ‘profound storehouse’, was born Chen Hui (Chen, family name; Hui, given name). Indian texts call him the Mahayana Tripiṭaka master or Mokṣadeva (‘god of liberation’). Older western sources use spellings like Hsüan-tsang, Hiuen Tsang or Hiuen Tsiang—all from the Wade-Giles romanisation system. Modern usage follows Pinyin (the official romanisation system used in modern China), leading to Xuanzang. Despite the variations, all refer to the same legendary seventh-century monk who journeyed to India in search of sacred texts.
FEEDING WISDOM
KING HARSHAVARDHANA, the Hindu emperor of Kannauj, had tasked two hundred families each in over a 100 villages with the daily supply of cartloads of rice, milk and butter to the Nalanda monastery-university. As an honoured guest at Nalanda, Xuanzang was given “twenty betel leaves, areca nuts and nutmegs, over an ounce of fine incense, almost a pint of rice, and an unlimited supply of butter and milk” daily and for free. He was also provided
with two servants and an elephant to
help him get around.
A SWEET INDIAN IDEA
XUANZANG’S ACCOUNT of his Indian journey so intrigued Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty that he initiated a series of missions to India, both spiritual and political. Nalanda was honoured with gifts from the emperor; Chinese envoys began discussing with Indian rulers ways to check the rising power of Tibet, and the Indian technology to make sugar from sugarcane (boiling and cooling sugarcane juice to get solid sugar masses called khanda in Sanskrit—the root of candy) was taken to China.