The Monk Xuanzang

One evening, a small child finished watching a film and ran to their parents, bursting with excitement. "I know Tang Sanzang now! He has Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West, to protect him, and Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing too!" The parents smiled, then said something softly that made the child's eyes go wide: "You know, in real life there was once a Tang monk too."

That real Tang monk was named Xuanzang. And the true story of his life is even more wonderful than the film.

Xuanzang was born in about the year 602, near Luoyang in China. Even as a child he was bright and eager to learn. As a young man he went to the capital, Chang'an, read a great many scriptures, and soon became known as a learned monk. But the more he studied, the more uneasy he felt. The Chinese versions of the scriptures in his hands had gaps, and in places they contradicted one another. He longed to go back to the source, to India, the faraway land where the Buddha's teaching began.

But there was a problem. The Tang dynasty had only just been founded, and the emperor had forbidden ordinary people to travel west out of the country on their own. Xuanzang asked Emperor Taizong for permission, but the emperor refused.

And this is where the real story parts ways with the film. In the novel Journey to the West, the emperor sees the monk off with great ceremony, and three disciples with magic powers guard him on the road. For the real Xuanzang, it was the other way around. In about the year 629, or 627 by some reckonings, he slipped quietly out of Chang'an, with no imperial order, no Sun Wukong and no Bajie. There was only a young monk, a traveler's bundle, and a long road stretching far ahead.

Ahead of him lay the desert.

This was the Gobi, a vast expanse of sand. It was a place of great hardship. The days were scorching, the nights bitterly cold and windy, and for many long days there was not a drop of water. At times there was nothing but sand and sky, not a single tree, not a single roof. At night the desert fell completely silent, and countless stars filled the sky. Alone in a sea of sand, he still pressed on toward the west.

Once across the desert, he went on through Central Asia, over towering mountain passes covered in snow all year round. Along the way, kings and kind merchant caravans helped him. They gave him a place to rest and food for the road, and they showed him the safe way forward. Step by step, he drew closer to the land of the Buddha.

At last he reached the place he had dreamed of: Nalanda University.

At that time, Nalanda was the greatest center of Buddhist learning in the world. Thousands of monks studied there together and debated the teachings. Xuanzang stayed for many years, studying under a great master named Shilabhadra. He learned Sanskrit and Buddhist philosophy, and he studied with such passion that he became one of the very best students of that famous school.

When his studies were done, he got ready to go home. But this time he would not go home empty-handed.

Xuanzang brought back 657 scriptures. With them came 150 Buddhist relics and precious statues of the Buddha. A whole treasure of knowledge was loaded onto a train of horses for the long road home.

In the year 645, after 16 or 17 years away, Xuanzang arrived back in Chang'an. The whole capital poured out to greet him. People say the crowds packed the streets so tightly that no one could pass. Most moving of all, Emperor Taizong, the same emperor who had once refused to let him go, now invited him to an audience and praised him warmly. His old defiance of the ban was forgiven, because what he had brought back was so great.

From then until the end of his life, Xuanzang gave all his time to translating the scriptures. With a group of monks, he worked tirelessly to carry a great many texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. Among them was one short but very deep text, closely tied to his name. It was the Heart Sutra. It holds a line that many people still know by heart today: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. It is only a short line, yet a person can ponder it for a whole lifetime and never reach the end.

He also wrote a treasured book called the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, in 12 volumes. It describes in detail the lands, the peoples and the customs of the regions he had passed through. The book is so valuable that historians and archaeologists still read it today to understand the ancient world.

More than 900 years after Xuanzang came home, a writer usually thought to be Wu Cheng'en drew on that true journey to write the novel Journey to the West. Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing are characters that later storytellers imagined, to make the tale more thrilling. But the heart of it is entirely true. A monk really did travel to bring back the scriptures, through countless hardships.

When the Heart Sutra is chanted in a Vietnamese pagoda, its words have come a very long way. They crossed deserts and snowy peaks, following the patient footsteps of the real Tang monk. He had no magic powers at all, only a heart that would not give up the road.