Literary Style and Composition of Memoirs of a Pilgrimage to the Five Indian Kingdoms: Koreaness of a Buddhist Travelogue

In the first half of the 8th century, a Korean monk named Hyech’o (704?-787 CE) went on a pilgrimage to India. It was not the first time a monk originating from the Korean Peninsula travelled to India; before Hyech’o, several Korean monks went to the border of the oecumene. The only survived travelogue of a Korean monk visited India is the one by Hyech’o, Memoirs of a Pilgrimage to the Five Indian Kingdoms (往五天竺國傳). The preserved manuscript was found in Mogao caves by Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) and is held in the French National Library. There are two translations of the travelogue into English; however, none of them study stylistic features of the text, nor are travelogue’s lexicon features researched, whereas Hyech’o’s travelogue has distinctive style and does not follow standard Buddhist travelogue structure. This paper shows preliminary results of a research which aims to study composition, lexical and stylistic features of the travelogue compared to notes of Xuanzang (Records of the Western Regions, 大唐西域記). The study is qualitative research. Comparative method was applied to check the structure and toponym differences in Hyech’o’s text and Records of the Western Regions. Literary analysis is used to identify lexical features of the travelogue, to understand if Hyech’o uses specific phrases for introducing a new place he visits. Hyech’o, compared to other renowned Chinese pilgrims, is quite frank with the reader, especially in his poems, each of which shares Hyech’o’s emotions. Hyech’o, being of Korean origin, might have left unique lexical and stylistic characteristics in the travelogue.