The Anonymous Monk was travelling from Mt. Wutai to the Nälandä Monastery in what is modern day India. It is suggested that the monk’s actual name was Daozhao, since the last copy of the manuscripts were made by a monk of this name in the year 968. As a Buddhist, this was a common trip in which a monk would travel from temple to temple on his spiritual journey to ultimately see the face of Sakyamuni in the Holy Land.
The monk began his pilgrimage in the year 940, and it is unclear when he ended. He prayed and strengthened his knowledge at the Wu Wei, Longxing, and Dayun temples. It is believed that the monk traces back into Chinese territory after briefly entering Tibetan temple sites, hence why it is believed that the monk began in China, entered Tibet, re-entered China, and then made his way to India. This is corroborated by his fourth letter, in which the monk requests an escort from the Longxing Temple in Dunhuang to the Dayun Temple and then returns on the same route back to Dunhuang after visiting the temple. However, the route that the monk took after leaving Dunhuang is an estimation based upon his and the manuscripts of similar travelers on that route around the same time period.
Unfortunately, his letters have been combined within the main manuscript, which is broken into three parts. The tales of the Anonymous Monk are, therefore, not set in stone after departing Dunhuang for a second time. The little information obtained on these parts of the journey appear to be notes from monastic officials, who also appear within them. It is thought that the monk would have travelled to the city of Hotan in China and gone to the Nälandä Monastery from there, thus completing his pilgrimage. His last letters were written in Dunhuang and are confined within the 17th Cave, where they remained for nine centuries.
Today, the manuscript is used for study of linguistic as well as cultural interactions between the Chinese and Tibetans. We can conclude that the Anonymous Monk’s (or possibly the monk named Daozhao) journey continued the spread of Buddhist teachings and wisdom from China, through Tibet, and into India. For our map and information on this journey, we used the 2011 Van, Schamick Sam, et al. book Manuscripts and Travellers: The Sino-Tibetan Documents of a Tenth-Century Buddhist Pilgrim.