3 ideas
Each country is described using the same sequence of fields: size and distance from the previous land, terrain and soil, climate, crops and produce, people's temperament and customs, script and language, ruler, and the number of monasteries, monks and schools. Holding the fields constant makes very different places directly comparable. It also means a missing field stands out as a gap to fill instead of going unnoticed.
The record separates countries the author travelled through from those he only heard about, marking reported lands with phrases like 'from here going … one arrives at'. Tagging each entry by where the knowledge came from lets readers weigh eyewitness observation differently from hearsay.
The author counts monasteries and monks and names each school, Mahayana or Hinayana, for every country. He also notes where monasteries lie ruined or deserted and where other religions' temples outnumber Buddhist ones. Recorded consistently across many regions, these institutional counts show where a tradition is thriving, splitting into schools, or declining, which doctrine alone cannot show.