Tang Sanzang is a main character of Journey to the West. Wikidata's Chinese label and the Chinese Wikipedia article title are both Tang Sanzang, and other names are recorded, such as Tang Seng, Xuanzang, Chen Xuanzang and Jiangliu. The article explains that Sanzang fashi is a respectful term for a monk versed in the three collections of sutra, vinaya and abhidharma, and that calling him Tang Sanzang honors him as the Tripitaka master of the Tang state, which also avoids using his personal name, so it is not a personal name. No single personal name has been established for the figure in the novel, so the heading stays as it was.[1][2]
Prototype and portrayal
According to the Chinese Wikipedia article, the prototype of Tang Seng, Tang Sanzang, is the Tang monk Xuanzang, and the Song text Da Tang Sanzang qujing shihua also calls him Xuanzang. In the novel he is kind, merciful and firm of will, though sometimes he appears pedantic and unable to tell right from wrong. His treasures are the nine-ring staff and the brocade cassock given by the bodhisattva Guanyin, and at the end of the story he achieves the right fruit and is enfeoffed as the Buddha of Sandalwood Merit. The article also notes that among the sutras the historical Xuanzang translated, the Heart Sutra and the Medicine Buddha Sutra survive, that he traveled overland out of Xinjiang through the Pamirs to India, and that on his return he compiled the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions from what he saw and heard at the order of Emperor Taizong of Tang, and that in the mid-1560s the Ming writer Wu Cheng'en turned such stories into the chapter-novel Journey to the West.[2]
On the term Sanzang
The article stresses that today the public, not knowing Buddhism and influenced by Journey to the West, often wrongly takes Sanzang to be a title belonging to Xuanzang alone. In fact Sanzang fashi is a term of respect, also Sanzang bhikshu or Sanzang holy teacher or simply Sanzang, and to confine the title to a single person is mistaken. It lists other famous Tripitaka masters in history, such as An Shigao of the Eastern Han, Kumarajiva and Faxian of the Eastern Jin, Gunabhadra of the Liu Song, Siksananda, Yijing and Amoghavajra of the Tang, and says Lingxian is the only Tripitaka master in Japanese history.[2]