The building of the Buddha’s Shadow Platform by Hui-yuan is a well-known event in the Buddhist history of Medieval China. The Platform was an imitation of the so-called Buddha’s Shadow in a stone cavern in Nagarahāra, a country located in today’s Afghanistan. Huiyuan says he got the related information from a Chan Master from Kashmir and a Vinaya Master from the South. It is clear that the Chan Master from Kashmir is Buddhabhadra, a Buddhist monk from India, but who is the Vinaya Master from the South? The paper’s aim is to prove that this Master is no other than Faxian, one of the most prominent pilgrim monks who visited India, including other countries in the West, early in the fifth century.
