Mention of Fusang ("Fousang des Chinois") on a 1792 French world map, in the area of modern British Columbia. According to the report of Hui Shen to the Chinese during his visit to China, described in the Liang Shu: "Fusang is 20,000 li to the East of the country of Dàhàn (lit. 'Great Han'), and located to the east of China (lit. 'Middle Kingdom').""On that land, there are many Fusang plants (perhaps red mulberry) that produce oval-shaped leaves similar to paulownia and edible purplish-red fruits like pears. The place was rich in copper and traces of gold and silver but no iron. The native tribes in Fusang were civilized, living in well-organized communities. They produced paper from the bark of the Fusang plants for writing and produced cloth from the fibers of the bark, which they used for robes or wadding. Their houses or cabins were constructed with red mulberry wood. The fruits and young shoots of the plants were one of their food sources. They raised deer for meat and milk, just as the Chinese raised cattle at home, and produced cheese with deer milk. They traveled on horseback and transported their goods with carts or sledges pulled by horses, buffalo, or deer." (Liang Shu, in Lily Chow) On the organization of the country: "An emperor, or a main chief, with the help of several officials, governed the country. The majority of people were law-abiding citizens. The country had no army or military defense but two jails, one in the north and the other in the south of the country. Those who had committed serious crimes were sent to the north and they stayed there for their entire lives. These inmates, however, could get married. If they got married and produced children, their sons became slaves and their daughters remained as maids" (Liang Shu, in Lily Chow) On the social practices: "The marriage arrangement was relatively simple. If a boy wanted to marry a girl, he had to build a cabin next to the home of the girl and stay there for a year. If the girl liked him they would get married; otherwise he would be asked to go away…When a person died in the community his body would be cremated. The mourning period varied from seven days for the death of a parent to five days for a grandparent and three days for a brother or sister. During their mourning period they were not supposed to consume food, only water. They had no religion." (Liang Shu, in Lily Chow) The Liang Shu also describes the conversion of Fusang to the Buddhist faith by five Buddhist monks from Gandhara: "In former times, the people of Fusang knew nothing of the Buddhist religion, but in the second year of Da Ming of the Liu Song dynasty (485 AD), five monks from Kipin (Kabul region of Gandhara) travelled by ship to that country. They propagated Buddhist doctrine, circulated scriptures and drawings, and advised the people to relinquish worldly attachments. As a result, the customs of Fusang changed
Fusang West Coast of America
Fusang (Chinese: 扶桑) refers to several different entities in ancient Chinese literature, often either a mythological tree or a mysterious land to the East.
In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and in several other similar text of this period,[1] it refers to a mythological mulberry tree of life allegedly growing far to the east of China, and later to the Hibiscus genus, and perhaps to various more concrete territories east of China.[1][2]
A country named Fusang was described by the native Buddhist missionary Hui Shen (Chinese: 慧深; pinyin: Huì Shēn) in 499 AD,[3] as a place 20,000 Chinese li east of Da-han, and also east of China (according to Joseph Needham, Da-han corresponds to the Buriat region of Siberia).[1] Hui Shen went by ship to Fusang, and upon his return reported his findings to the Chinese Emperor. His descriptions are recorded in the 7th-century text Book of Liang by Yao Silian, and describe a Bronze Age civilization inhabiting the Fusang country. The Fusang described by Shen has been variously posited to be the Americas, Sakhalin island, the Kamchatka Peninsula or the Kuril Islands. The American hypothesis was the most hotly debated one in the late 19th and early 20th century after the 18th-century writings of Joseph de Guignes were revived and disseminated by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1875. Sinologists including Emil Bretschneider, Berthold Laufer, and Henri Cordier refuted this hypothesis however, and according to Needham the American hypothesis was all but refuted by the time of the First World War.[1]
Later Chinese accounts used the name Fusang for other, even less well identified places
Fou-Sang or Fusang, a 5th Century Chinese Colony in Western America?
1776 Zatta Map of the Pacific Northwest Showing Fusang 1776 Zatta Map of the Pacific Northwest Showing Fusang
East of the Eastern Ocean lie The shores of the Land of Fusang. If, after landing there, you travel East for 10,000 li You will come to another ocean, blue, Vast, huge, boundless.
This ancient poem, written by a 3rd century Chinese poet, describes a place that is often referred to in Chinese folklore as the “Birthplace of the Sun”. It was a place well known in ancient China. It appears frequently in poetry and around the 2nd century BC, one Han emperor is said to have sent an expedition to colonize this land. Where was the legendary land of Fusang? Eighteenth century mapmakers placed it in North America, usually near what is today Washington or Vancouver. These cartographers, most notably De L’Isle and Zatta, mapped Fusang based on a popular essay written by the French orientalist historian Josepth de Guignes in his 1761 article “Le Fou-Sang des Chinois est-il l’Amérique? ” De Guignes was a dubious historian at best, but with this he may have been on to something. Fusang is most fully described on by the 6th century itinerant monk Hui Shen.
Hui Shen is said to have been a mendicant Gondaran monk and to have appeared in the court of the Emperor Wu Ti at Jingzhou in Southern Qi in 499 AD. His adventures, which are described by Yao Sialian in the 7th century Book of Liang, describes his voyage in both known and unknown lands. Starting around 455 AD, he traveled to the coast of China, to Japan, Korea, to the Kamchatka Peninsula, then to Fusang. Fusang, he reports is some 20,000 Chinese Li (about 9,000 km) east of Kamchatka. This would place it somewhere around what is today British Columbia, roughly where Zatta and De L’Isle map the colony of Fusang.
While it is a subject of ferocious debate, numerous scholars and historians have embraced the idea that the Chinese not only visited the New World but maintained regular contact with it. We have long known that, given the advanced stated of shipbuilding and navigation in ancient China, the Chinese were capable of launching expeditions across the Pacific. The real question is, did they? The story of Hui Shen is one of the few actual documents that describe such an voyage. Hui Shen’s tale, which offers anthropological and geographic commentary consistent with Pacific Coast of America, describes Fusang in considerable detail. Over the past 200 years numerous scholars, both eastern and western, have broken down the Hui Shen text. Some have declared it a fabrication, but most have embraced the idea that the Chinese did in fact not only visit America, but maintained a minor but active back and forth communication.
1772 Vaugondy Map of the Pacific Northwest showing Fou-Sang 1772 Vaugondy Map of the Pacific Northwest showing Fou-Sang
Though many scholars agree that the Fusang tale does have some element of truth, few agree on where it may have been. Some point to Peru (Hui Shen describes the leader of Fusang as the “Inki”), others to Mexico (Fusang = Maguey), and still others to British Columbia (most likely arrival point sailing east from Kamchatka with the easterly North Pacific Current). The name Fusang itself is derived from Chinese mythology where it is a land or tree in the east from which the Sun is born. This kind of plant, or something similar, is described as common in the Land of Fusang. Fusang is billed as a kind of all purpose plant which can be eaten, made into clothing and made into paper, etc. There is considerable debate as to what Fusang may have been, with some identifying it with the Maguay of Mexico, others with various types of Cactus, and still others ancient varieties of corn (which were common along the Pacific Coast of North America).
There is some, but not significant, historical evidence to support the idea that the Chinese were active in Ancient America. Ancient Chinese coins, ship anchors (James R. Moriarty of the University of San Diego), and other relics have been discovered along the American coast – some dating back as much as 2,000 years! Also, Hui Shen’s descriptions do correspond somewhat with what we know of the New World around 450 AD. It is far too much for this short blog post to breakdown the details of Hui Shen’s narrative, especially when it has been done so well and so well by others, however, our list of references below can offer significant further reading.
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The name 'Fusang' 扶桑 first appears in the Shanhai Jing 《山海经》, a compilation of mythological accounts of strange lands and creatures edited by Liu Xin 刘歆 of the late Western Han and Xin dynasties. It is stated there that in the 'Black-tooth Country' (Heichi Guo 黑齿国), in the Eastern Sea, the people are black-skinned and eat rice and snakes. They always have one red snake and one green snake at their side. Another version of the tale is that the people there keep tame pet snakes, one of which is always red. In the north of this country there is a valley called Hot Spring Valley (Tang Gu 汤谷), where a tree called the Fusang grows. The ten suns (this is from the legend of Hou Yi who shot down nine of the suns) bathe there. The Fusang tree grows in the water of Hot Spring Valley, and is very tall. When the ten suns are bathing, nine of them sit on branches that are underwater (i.e. in the hot spring water), and one of them sits on a branch above water.
So far, Fusang is only the name of a tree in the Black-tooth Country, and not a land.
But in 499, a Buddhist monk named Huishen 慧深 is supposed to have appeared at Jingzhou 荆州 in Southern Qi 南齐 (one of the Southern Dynasties), claiming to be from a land called Fusang. Fusang, according to him, was over 20,000 li east of the Dahan Country 大汉国, which was known to be over 5,000 li east of the Wenshen (Tattoo) Country 文身国, which was 7,000 li north of the Wo 倭 country, i.e. Japan (Wenshen = possibly Hokkaido, Sakhalin or Kuril Islands?). His account:
Fusang is east of China, and there are many Fusang trees growing on its soil, hence its name. The Fusang tree is like the tong 桐 (paulownia) tree, but when it first sprouts it is like a bamboo shoot, and the people there eat it. Its fruit is like a pear and is red, and its skin can be peeled and used as cloth for clothing or as brocade. The people make houses out of wooden planks, but have no cities. They have a form of writing and use Fusang leaves as paper. They have no weapons and armour and do not fight wars. The law of the country is that there are a north mountain and a south mountain. Those who commit small crimes are exiled into the south mountain, and those who commit serious crimes are exiled into the north mountain. If there is a general amnesty, it applies only to the exiles in the south mountain and not the north mountain. The male and female exiles in the north mountain marry among themselves, and their sons become slaves at the age of 7 and their daughters become slaves at the age of 8. Until death, they will not be freed from their status as criminals.
If an aristocrat commits a crime, the country holds a big meeting. The criminal sits in a ditch, and the others eat and drink in front of him, treating him like he is already dead. After that they draw a ring or rings of ash around him, and if there is only one ring he is the only one to become an outcast; if two rings then his sons and grandsons will also be outcasts; if three rings then seven generations will be outcasts.
The King is called a Yiqi 乙祁, a first-class aristocrat is a Great Duilu 大对卢, a second-class aristocrat is a Small Duilu 小对卢, and a third-class aristocrat is a Naduosha 纳咄沙. When the King travels around, he has an entourage of drummers and trumpeters. The people's colour of clothing changes every two years in a ten-year cycle with five colours: blue, red, yellow, white, and black. There are cows there with very long horns, and the horns can be used to hold objects to a capacity of over 20 hu 斛. There are carriages drawn by horses, cows, and deer. The people rear deer like China rears cattle, and they use the milk to make yoghurt. There are Fusang pears that do not spoil even after a year. There are also many grapes (putao 蒲桃). The land has no iron but has bronze, and the people do not value gold and silver. The markets there do not have prices (i.e. they use barter).
Their marriage practice is that the male suitor builds a house outside the girl's front door and sweeps the doorway in the morning and at night. After a year, if the girl does not like him, she chases him away, and if she likes him they get married. The wedding ceremony is roughly like China's. When a parent dies, the children fast for seven days; when a grandparent dies, the grandchildren fast for 5 days; when a sibling, uncle, or aunt dies, the fasting is 3 days. A shrine is built in the form of an idol, and is worshipped in the morning and at night, but no mourning apparel is worn. When a new king comes to the throne, he does not personally govern for the first three years. The country originally did not know Buddhism, but in 458, 5 monks from the kingdom of Gandhara/Kabul (Jibin 罽宾) travelled there and brought the Buddhist law, sutras and icons, teaching people to enter the monkhood. The customs of the country thus changed.
Huishen went on to describe a country of women:
Over a thousand li east of Fusang, there is the Women's Country (Nuguo 女国), where the women are beautiful and very fair-skinned. Their skins are hairy and the hair on their heads is so long it touches the ground. In the second and third months, they rush into the waters and become pregnant, giving birth in the sixth and seventh months. The women have no breasts, and on the back of their necks there are hairs with white roots which produce a juice which they feed to their children. The children can walk within 100 days, and become adults within 3 or 4 years. When they see people, they are alarmed and hide, and they are especially afraid of men. They eat the salty grass in the manner of animals - the salty grass has leaves like wormwood (i.e. feather-like) and is fragrant but has a salty taste.
Huishen's account is in the 'Various Barbarians' (诸夷) chapter of the Liangshu 《梁书》, the dynastic history of the Liang dynasty (502-557). The chapter adds that in 507, a man from Jin'an 晋安 (today's Fuzhou 福州) sailed across the sea and drifted with the wind to an island. He went ashore and found people living there. The women were like Chinese, but spoke an unrecognizable language; the men had dog's heads and made barking noises. They ate small beans and wore what looked like hemp cloth. They made walls out of soil in a circular shape, and the doors were like holes. [Could this be Taiwan??]
Later in Chinese history, from the Tang dynasty onwards, Fusang became a synonym for Japan. However, modern scholars have speculated about whether Huishen's Fusang, which was clearly a different place from Japan, really existed and where it could have been. One popular theory is that Huishen was a Chinese monk who sailed to Mexico and met the Mayan people. The Fusang pear was either corn or a native American plant called the maguey (related to the agave azul, which is the source of tequila liquor):
"Through the great canyon a large river flows from the north to the south and falls into the northern end of the Gulf of California. Now, in the useful translations of the Spanish authors of 1540 AD we find that the scribe of the Conquistadors placed near the Colorado River, in a small island, a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism. He mentions a divine personage living in a small house near a lake upon this island, and called, as he says, Quatu-zaca, who was reputed never to eat."
VOYAGES: l'Histoire de la Découverte de l'Amérique, Vol IX, Henri Ternaux-Compans (1836)
"A deified priest or lama, who is said to have lived on a small island near the Colorado River, had the name of Quatu Sacca which seems to combine the two names Gautama and Sakhya."
The Buddhist Discovery of America a Thousand Years Before Columbus, John Fryer (1901)
In the summer of 1971, the first summer following my last major excursion into the High Sierras and the desert southwest with my Uncle, was the first time I recall hearing the ancient Mesoamerican name Quatu zaca, and most especially so, referring it back to the great Enlightened sage from India, Gautama Shakyamuni, the Buddha.
I was updating my uncle via phone regarding the health of his brother, my father, who had the year before been caught in a fire while on the job. He received some rather severe burns as well as an excessive amount of smoke inhalation leading to a collapsed lung and most of the hair burnt off his head and arms. Right after the fire my uncle came to see him in the hospital with the two of them spending most of the time talking about the old days. After a week or so my uncle headed back home to Santa Fe. Since that visit my father had been released and become an outpatient. The primary reason I was updating my uncle was because the doctors had become much more concerned that my dad was not showing the amount of recovery they were hoping for, still having a great deal of trouble with his lungs and breathing. They had dealt with all of his symptoms and lungs as best they could and told me, among other things, they had ruled out for example, tuberculosis and that sort of thing, but to still expect the worse, telling me one year, two at the most.
A few days before calling my uncle I was sitting in a hospital waiting room stalling for time as my father went through some test or the other, going over in my mind what the doctor had told me, including even, being relieved over the not to be concerned with tuberculosis aspect of it all. I had long known tuberculosis was a deadly disease having learned about it when I was ten years old or so. My uncle and I, in the process of our travels throughout the desert southwest in my early years, had gone to the 'town to tough to die,' Tombstone, Arizona. While there I saw a reenactment of the shootout at the OK Corral. The narrator said that one of the participants in the real shootout, Doc Holliday, had tuberculosis and since he was going to die anyway he was 'fearless in the face of death.' For some reason, as the kid I was, I loved that 'fearless in the face of death' comment and never forgot Holliday or the word tuberculosis.
In conversation on the phone with my uncle that day I brought up the tuberculosis story and in passing just happen to mention I had it in my mind to visit Holliday's gravesite some day just for the heck of it.
A few months later, in fall of 1971, my uncle called and asked me to meet him in Denver, Colorado. Now while it is true the two of us catching up ended with us driving down to Glenwood Springs to see Holliday's gravesite and seeing a bunch of petroglyphs during our trip, his call was for much more than that. At first he was very shook up saying it was imperative that we meet, almost as though for ME there was no other option. Apparently the day before he had been sitting in a café in Taos, New Mexico when a Native American spiritual elder and peyote road man by the name of Little Joe Gomez along with two other men stepped up to his table. Gomez, who my uncle knew, introduced the two men then left. According to my uncle the two men said they were emissaries of a supposedly highly regarded Buddhist monk then residing in Boulder, Colorado and of which, at the time of the call, my uncle couldn't remember his name let alone pronounce it. The two men said the highly regarded monk, who turned out to be Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, wanted to meet with my uncle and were there to escort him back to Boulder. He said the two men were very insistent, almost to the point of coercion, and seemed more like thugs than you would expect so-called Buddhist emissaries to be like, with a just below the surface demeanor reminding him of my ex-stepmother's onetime friend Johnny Roselli. In any case, in that I had a Buddhist background --- and the fact that my uncle was somewhat apprehensive over the whole thing --- he wanted me to meet him in Denver on his way through to Boulder. Which I did.
After arriving in Boulder, per Trungpa's request, we met in a small closed-door room on one of the upper floors of the library at the University of Colorado. At first he seemed set-back when he saw my uncle was traveling with someone like me, but without missing a beat, after brief introductions and selectively leaving me out of the conversation, he immediately went to the subject at hand as though he and my uncle had been friends forever. As Trungpa put it, he had become privy to strong rumors, at least in how it related to the legends and lore of the desert southwest, that an ancient Buddhist temple, perhaps Tibetan, existed deep in a cave high along the walls of the Grand Canyon, and if it was so, he wanted to see it. He said where he came from there was usually more truth to such legends than falsehood, it was only that the truth was veiled to the unknowing. He had been told by powers that be if there was anybody that would know or could get him there, it would be my uncle. My uncle told him that as long as he could remember he had heard of such rumors and legends, but that as he was presently constituted and stood before him, he himself had never tread foot in such a place as he described. Such places, my uncle said, when they do exist are typically known only to a few and not meant to be trespassed against.
It seemed as though an instant flash of anger crossed Trungpa's face hearing my uncle's response, then dismay and maybe even distraught. Trungpa asked if my uncle had any other suggestions. My uncle looked down toward the floor and shook his head no. When we turned to leave the two men who brought us were in effect, blocking the exit, but with a slight one-finger hand gesture Trungpa waved them off. They moved aside, my uncle exited and just as I was about to fully pass from the room Trungpa asked, "Who was your Teacher?" Other than a slight smile I offered no response. Without saying a word, with a quick one-arm push he spun the office-like chair with roller wheels he was sitting in away from the table toward the window, turning his back and silently staring into the darkness beyond.
The next morning after having breakfast with a friend of my uncle, an artist named Howard Fogg, we headed toward Glenwood Springs and Holliday's grave site following a night of silence regarding Trungpa or the meeting in the library.[1] As the morning wore on my uncle began elaborating on the legend Trungpa was interested in --- without revealing how much of it was known to him to be true or not. From the very moment my uncle gave his carefully worded response to Trungpa, saying "as he was presently constituted and stood before him, he himself had never tread foot in such a place as he described," I knew there was more to the story than he was letting on. As he was presently constituted opens up a lot of doors for someone like my uncle who operated on a number of spiritual planes, without actually answering the question. While we were driving my uncle didn't have every one of the specific facts at his fingertips (i.e., all the names, dates, etc.), more or less paraphrasing the story as we traveled along. Although I let him continue as he knew it, what my uncle didn't realize at the time was that I already had a fairly good working knowledge on the subject and easily filled in the blanks. What I didn't know, or at least it was new to me under that name, was Quatu zaca and the Grand Canyon cave part of the story. Since then I have gone back and researched the subject on and off over the years, mostly out of curiosity, and filled in most of those blanks.
Basically, as the story goes, in 458 AD a Buddhist monk named Hui Shen from somewhere within the landlocked area adjacent to China which now days would be considered Afghanistan, along with several other monks (some say as few as four, others say as many as 40), sailed across the north Pacific from China to North America, with Hui Shen returning in 499 AD to report his adventures to the court of the Chinese emperor.
The following is said to have been translated as found in the History of the Liang Dynasty, compiled circa AD 600, regarding Hui Shen and his trip to America:
"In former times, the people of Fusang guo knew nothing of the Buddhist religion, but in the second year of Da Ming [around AD 458] five monks from Chipin traveled by ship to that country. They propagated Buddhist doctrines, circulated scriptures and drawings, and advised people to relinquish worldly attachments. As a result, the customs of Fusang changed."[2]
The Grand Canyon part of the story actually has three tied together parts, two from ancient Chinese history and one stemming from more recent times in America. Fusang or Fu-Sang, is considered to be the land that existed to the east of China beyond the Great Sea. References to Fusang begin to show up most seriously in Shan Hai King, the "Classic of Mountains and Seas," an ancient multi-volume set of Chinese books compiled in 2250 BCE that contain accounts of Chinese geographers that traveled throughout the world gathering up information on the surface features of the Earth and their locations. According to scholars who study such things there were originally 32 books, but in the 5th century AD, all of the subject matter was condensed into 18 books, and of those 18 not all have been translated into English. Two of the books in translation, the Ninth and Fourteenth Books, carry the subtitles "In Regard to the Regions Beyond the Sea, from its Southeast Corner to its Northeast Corner" and "The Classic of the Great Eastern Waste," both of which relate to the Grand Canyon and surrounding territories, to wit the following quote. While reading the quote below remember, albeit in translation for our purposes here, is cited as being written in 2250 BCE, over 4000 years ago:
"Nature's most magnificent display of her handiwork—the Great Luminous Canyon with the little stream flowing in a bottomless ravine—outspectacles every other natural extravaganza on this earth with its brilliant yellows, vibrant oranges, deep subtle reds and in its shadows pale lavenders toning into rich, velvet blues—like a glorious sunrise or sunset. Nothing but the sun itself could have imparted such rich color—and nowhere else does it exist."
The second part of the three parts relating to the Grand Canyon circles around the previously mentioned Buddhist monk Hui Shen and his travels to, from, and in Fusang circa 458 AD to 499 AD. In the book Inglorious Columbus (1885) by Edward Payson Vining there is a map that outlines Hui Shen's voyage and travels to the new world. Basically, according to Vining, he followed the curve of the Aleutian Islands from China to Alaska and down the west coast of America to Mexico. However, Hui Shen's own record of his travels indicates he went inland from the coast at least as far as the Grand Canyon before turning south toward Mexico. In a book by Henriette Mertz titled Pale Ink (1953), Mertz postulates, and I am in agreement with, that although Hui Shen may have used the sea route as described by Vining, he only did so as far south as southern California. There he and his party went ashore in an area located just north of present day Point Hueneme between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles where the Santa Clara River exits into the Pacific. How he knew about or went about selecting the Point Hueneme location I'm not sure, but considering the distance one would have to travel, plus all the hardships, difficulties, and potential lack of water one would encounter trying to reach the Colorado River on foot from the Pacific, it is probably the best of all starting points.
For the third part of the Grand Canyon saga we have to move from 458 AD and return to the works of Edward Payson Vining and his book Inglorious Columbus published in 1885. However, between the start and finish of that move there needs to be a little bit more ground work and explanation inserted. If you remember from above I said some say Hui Shen traveled to Fusang with as few as four, others say with as many as 40 people (monks) in his entourage. Where those who say such things come up with such figures I am not sure. However, the written account of Hui Shen indicates that before he even got to Fusang in the first place his trip had already been proceeded by five monks. The author Charles G. Leland in his tome on Hui Shen titled Fu-sang points out that in the narrative by Hoei-shin (Hui Shen), he mentions that five beggar-monks (whom Hui Shen purportedly met there) were already in Fusang in A.D. 458 and that they had brought with them images of Buddha.
The question has always been, in that Hui Shen traveled thousands of miles east from China and almost an equal number of miles down the west coast of North America, why did he suddenly disembark his ships and turn inland on foot somewhere around Point Hueneme and cross eastward over a harsh and hostile desert for 300-400 miles? The answer may well be because of the five itinerant beggar-monks. Nowhere has it been recorded how, when, or the amount of time any of the five monks had been in America, only that they were. It is my belief they were not all present at the same time but, like the Dali Lama, the Pope, or the Phantom, one replaced the other in a long line of secession creating in a sense a venerated holy man. Hui Shen turned inland to pay homage to that venerated holy man. The Buddha was reputed to have been born around 563 BCE and died around 483 BCE. By the time of Christ some 400 years or so later the Buddhist religion was well established and shown to be so, for example, as found in such Buddhist texts as the Hemis Manuscripts. So said, by the time Hui Shen showed up in America circa 458 AD there had been plenty of time to have established lineage.
In the volumes of information regarding the Chinese and Buddhism in America before Columbus there is only a thin veneer that comes close to meeting the necessary criteria we are talking about here regarding Buddhism, Hui Shen, the Grand Canyon, and/or the Colorado River and the existence of a potential venerated holy man --- a thin veneer of which within are only two stories --- with the credibility of one, although repeated over and over as if it was so, is considered highly suspect by most.
That story begins in 1909 and revolves around a man identified in newspaper accounts as an archaeologist and explorer, reportedly working for the Smithsonian, and said to go by the name G.E. Kincaid (sometimes Kinkaid). On Friday, March 12, 1909 the Arizona Gazette, the leading evening newspaper in Phoenix, printed a small story about Kincaid completing a one-man voyage down the Colorado in a small skiff, having traversed the full length of the Grand Canyon and the river clear to Yuma, Arizona. In having done so the article says Kincaid stated that he had some very interesting archaeological discoveries he unearthed on the trip and they were of such interest he planned to "repeat it next winter in the company of friends." Then, three weeks later, rather than waiting until the next winter, on Monday April 5, 1909, the evening edition of the Arizona Gazette printed a semi-follow up article on the front page. The article went on to say that on the previous day, Sunday April 4th, Kincaid "related to the Gazette" that archaeologists of the Smithsonian Institute, of which he was one and of which was financing the expedition, were exploring a mysterious cave high up on the walls of the Grand Canyon hewn out of solid rock by human hands that he, Kincaid, discovered. Among other things the article goes on to say:
"Over a hundred feet from the entrance is the cross-hall, several hundred feet long in which is found the idol, or image, of the people's god, sitting cross-legged, with lotus flower or lily in each hand. The cast of the face is oriental, the carving shows a skillful hand, and the entire object is remarkably well preserved, as is everything in this cavern.
"The idol almost resembles Buddha, though the scientists are not certain as to what religious worship it represents. Taking into consideration everything found thus far, it is possible that this worship most resembles the ancient people of Tibet."
Many people, both credible and questionable, have researched and investigated all aspects of the contents of the article and have continued to come up short with any hard evidence of such a cave or even the existence of Kincaid himself. Many of those same investigators say the Smithsonian has no record of having any such person, persons, researchers, or archaeology-like teams participating in any venture similar to or like the ones so attributed to in the article.
For the second of the two stories we have to go back to circa 1540 and the Spanish expeditions into the Grand Canyon and Colorado River area under the command of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Coronado had a diarist or scribe, a chronicler if you will, by the name Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera that traveled with and recorded all aspects of the majority of the Coronado expeditions. Castañeda's original account, Relación de la jornada de Cíbola compuesta por Pedro de Castañeda de Nácera donde se trata de todas aquellos poblados y ritos, y costumbres, la cual fué el año de 1540, has been lost, but a copy is still in existence that was made in 1596.
In Appendix B of Inglorious Columbus the author, Edward Payson Vining, includes in his book a copy of a letter to the French Academy of Sciences by Charles Hippolyte Paravey de Chevalier dated April 26, 1847. In that letter Paravey cites, albeit second hand having done his research from the 10 volume works of the Americas from Henri Ternaux-Compans, in of which Volume IX he includes the writings of Castaneda and presents from that volume the following:
"One of the countries of America which was first converted by the shamans of Cabal, arriving from the southern point of Kamtchatka at the excellent port of San Francisco, in California, to the north of Monterey, must evidently have been the country upon the banks of the Colorado River, a large river which flows through these same regions from the north to the south and falls into the northern end of the Gulf of California. Now, in the useful translations of the Spanish authors made by Henri Ternaux-Compans, we find that Castaneda placed near the Colorado River, in a small island, a sanctuary of Lamaisra, or of Buddhism. He mentions a divine personage living in a small house near a lake upon this island, and called, as he says, Quatu-zaca, who was reputed never to eat."
John Fryer (1834-1924) was an eminent Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1901 an article he wrote titled The Buddhist Discovery of America a Thousand Years Before Columbus, was published in the July issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. On page 256, mimicking the information provided by Paravey's letter to the Academy and or the original source by Castaneda without citing either, the following appeared:
"A deified priest or lama, who is said to have lived on a small island near the Colorado River, had the name of Quatu Sacca which seems to combine the two names Gautama and Sakhya."[3]
As interesting as all of that is, what Fryer has to say in another part of the same article is even more so:
"There exists in Mexico a tradition of the visit of an extraordinary personage having a white complexion, and clothed in a long robe and mantle, who taught the people to abstain from evil and live righteously, soberly, and peacefully. At last he met with severe persecutions, and his life threatened, the suddenly disappeared, but left his imprint of his foot on a rock. A statue erected to his memory still stands upon a high rock at the village of Magdalena. He bore the name Wi-shi-pecocha, which is probably a transliteration of Hui Shen bikshu."
Nine hundred years after Hui Shen, according to records reportedly found in China and elsewhere, over a period of several years during the 1420s AD, China launched a series of seven long distant voyages intended to explore the world. The voyages were said to be under the command of Admiral Zheng He (1371-1435). As a part of those seven voyages, one of his four vice admirals, Captain Zhou-man, using the Kuroshio current, embarked toward the Pacific coast of North America, landing at Vancouver Island. From there Zhou-man's fleet sailed along the Pacific coast founding a number of colonies along the way. When they reached the coast of Peru the fleet turned west, reaching China using the prevailing currents. In the book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, the author, retired British submarine commander Gavin Menzies writes:
"The Chinese set up settlements all along the west coast of North America, from Vancouver Island to New Mexico and inter-married happily with the local Indians. When the first Spanish colonialists arrived in the 16th century they found many Chinese, as well as wrecked junks. But the diseases the European colonists brought with them wiped out 90% of the Indians, and destroyed the Chinese influence."
Menzies says the Zhou-man expedition traveled as far south as the coast of Peru before turning west and then, using the prevailing currents, returned to China. Along the way it is said he founded or put into place a number of settlements from Vancouver to New Mexico.
About 200 years before the Chinese expeditions of the 1420s began sailing along the western coast of North and South America, their island neighbor Japan had already laid their own groundwork, remnants of which I came across as a young boy.
Right after World War II I started traveling around the desert southwest with my Uncle exploring it's many natural wonders and interacting with it's indigenous cultures. It was during those early travels that I met members of a group of Native Americans from the Navajo Tribe known as Code Talkers. They had been recruited and placed on the war front in the South Pacific by the U.S. Marines to speak their own language back and forth between themselves via radio communication creating in a sense a secret code. Because of it, the whole of the Japanese war machine from Hirohito to Tojo to the lowest private were not able to decode or make heads or tails out of what was being said.
At the same time I was hearing about Navajo code talkers for the first time I was also hearing about their neighbors, the Zuni. As the story came down to me was that the Marines were able to use the Navajo as code talkers but not the Zuni because the Zuni spoke Japanese.
The Zuni native tongue supposedly being closely similar to that of the Japanese language in many respects has always been accepted on the ground in local lore, rumor, and legend. However, rising above the lore, rumor, and legend, it has been suggested there is strong evidence of rather substantial physical contact having existed between the two cultures, an inter-connection that occurred in the not-so-distant past. An anthropologist, Nancy Yaw Davis PhD, promulgated just such a theory, stating that between 1250 AD and 1400, a major change in settlement patterns occurred in the Zuni area, a major change she attributes to a large influx of Japanese into their culture. She backs up her theory with reams of research published in her book The Zuni Enigma (2001). Davis writes:
"This period, the late thirteenth century A.D., is proposed as the probable time for the arrival of Japanese pilgrims—with new language, religion, and genes. If a freeze-frame could capture that event, I believe it would reveal an entourage of people from many backgrounds arriving and deciding this was the exact middle of the universe, and then commencing to build large pueblos, drawing in straggling survivors of the Anasazi civilization.
"Of course we have neither a photograph nor a written record of what happened and why such a consolidation occurred. But this is an unusually thoroughly studied area: Sophisticated tree-ring dating, dendrochronology, provides a rich record of when structures were built, and the timing, severity, and length of droughts; skeletal remains indicate significant physical changes in the population; measurements and excavations of ruins reveal major changes in settlement patterns; glaze on pottery suddenly appears."
Posts: 5374 | From: sepedat/sirius | Registered: Jul 2012
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