Journey to the West is "China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure", according to historian Jonathan Spence. Published in the 1590s during the waning years of the Ming dynasty, the novel's hero is described by Spence as "a mischievous monkey with human traits [who] accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture." The work represents an allegory of pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment.
The inspiration for Journey came from the travels of a seventh-century Chinese man named Xuanzang (a name that has been rendered in various ways over the centuries). Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang'an (modern Xian), at age 13 Xuanzang followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life, Buddhism having come to China around five centuries earlier. A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west (and eventually southwest), to India, to the cradle and thriving centre of Buddhism. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhist scholars on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan (where he saw the standing Buddhas at Bamiyan), Xuanzang reached what is now Pakistan.
He spent 17 years, from 629 until 645, in the Subcontinent, travelling, visiting places associated with the Buddha's life, learning Sanskrit and studying with Buddhist masters. Most notably, Xuanzang studied with the teachers at Nalanda University in modern-day Bihar, one of the first great universities of the world, where subjects such as grammar, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine and theology were in the curriculum. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India. In a convocation of religious scholars, Xuanzang is said to have defeated 500 Brahmins, Jains and heterodox Buddhists in debate. The Nalanda establishment greatly admired Xuanzang, and offered him a senior position on their academic staff. But he is said to have declined with this reply: "Buddha established his doctrine so that it might be diffused to all lands. Who would wish to enjoy it alone, and to forget those who are not yet enlightened?" Long thereafter, he was accorded a place in Subcontinent's monastic iconography, tellingly depicted with chopsticks, a spoon and hemp shoes, and always sitting atop multicoloured clouds.
Before returning to China, Xuanzang gathered hundreds of Sanskrit texts, relics, statues and other artefacts, loaded them on pack animals, and set off for Xian across the Pamirs, by way of present-day NWFP. For the remaining 19 years of his life, until 664, he worked with a team of linguist monks, translating into Mandarin and writing commentaries on many of the 657 books that survived his journey (many others were lost when he crossed the Indus). When Buddhism largely died out in the Subcontinent, its texts lost forever, these translations became the only version of the originals. Xuanzang also published an account of his travels, now an invaluable historical and archaeological record.