Faxian was the Chinese Buddhist monk who visited India during the reign of Chandragupta II. His journey, undertaken in the early fifth century CE, makes him an important witness to Buddhist sites and Gupta-era society.
Faxian left China around 399 CE and traveled through Central Asia, northern India and parts of the subcontinent in search of Buddhist scriptures and monastic regulations. He spent roughly six years in India before returning by sea, and later described his travels in a work commonly known as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.
His account discusses monasteries, relics, pilgrimage centers and local customs. He portrays parts of the Gupta realm as prosperous and relatively orderly, though historians treat such descriptions cautiously because his primary interest was Buddhism rather than political reporting. Xuanzang and Yijing also traveled from China to India, but they belonged to later periods; Kumarajiva is chiefly known as a translator who worked in China.