In the year 629, a young monk slips out of the fortified Tang capital of Chang'an in defiance of an imperial travel ban, vanishes into Central Asia for nearly two decades, and returns to a hero's welcome from the very emperor whose law he broke. This episode follows the historical Xuanzang from the translation crisis in Chinese Buddhism that drove him to India, across the Taklamakan Desert and Tianshan Mountains, through thirteen years at Nalanda, and home in 646 to state-funded translation work, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, and the founding of the Faxiang school of consciousness-only philosophy.

We then trace how that survival story mutated over 900 years into the 100-chapter novel Journey to the West, with its oldest surviving edition printed in Nanjing in 1592, and why scholars like David Lattimore and W.J.F. Jenner doubt the traditional a ...