Talk:Tang Sanzang

If he's called Sanzang "For most of Journey to the West" -- and that's how I've heard of the famous character as such, shouldn't the title be Sanzang (currently empty) instead of Xuan Zang (fictional character)? --Menchi 04:27 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yeah i think we should all agree on one name for him because it's geting confusing for readers. I don't know which one is right, but i think we should just use either "Xuanzang" or "Sanzang" throughout the entire encyclopedia.

Small Hairy Man
Is there any link to a source about the discovery of the painting with the "small hairy man"?


 * I was going to ask the same question. The whole article could do with more than one source, especially as right now the one listed seems to be broken... --Oolong 12:41, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Style
Please remove the words "supernatural" and "magic". This doesn't fit to the concept of the story. The "supernatural" stuff and "magic" are powers attained through hard work (功夫). A deity or a buddha doesn't perform magic. --2.245.237.59 (talk) 22:05, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Requested move 15 February 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: consensus to move the page at this time, per the discussion below. Dekimasu よ! 19:50, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Xuanzang (Journey to the West) → Tang Sanzang – WP:NATURAL. Per article "He is mainly referred to as Tang Sanzang in the novel". Tang Sanzang currently redirects to Xuanzang the historical person, but I believe that's misguided. Chinese wiki also uses "Tang Sanzang" for this character. Also see the discussion at the top of this page. Timmyshin (talk) 21:36, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Oppose more helpful as is. In ictu oculi (talk) 08:34, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
 * How's this helpful if this isn't his common name? In the fictional universe he's rarely called Xuanzang, he's either Tang Sanzang or Tang Seng. (I don't oppose Tang Seng but that name seems inconsistent with Sha Wujing who is also known as Sha Seng, plus Tang Seng is more likely than Tang Sanzang to be ambiguous.) A similar case is King Lear vs. Leir of Britain. Timmyshin (talk) 12:04, 16 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Support: More consistent with our other articles on the characters of Journey to the West. I think "Tang Sanzang, based on the historical Xuanzang" would flow better and be a more accurate description in this article. Alex Shih (talk) 09:39, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
 * support, its his name referenced in the book. Plus, its not "really" the real person but more of a "inspired by" that its massively different. Artix Kreiger (talk) 21:55, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Support. If we are to have separate articles on the historical figure and the novel character based on him, it makes sense for the character's article to use the name he's called in the book.--Cúchullain t/ c 14:50, 22 February 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Tang Sanzang has 4 helpers, not 3
People always forget the White dragon horse aka dragon prince of the west sea; therefore, there are 5, not 4 heroes

Page name (again)
Currently, this page is named Tang Sanzang. As far as I can tell, the decision to change the name of this page was taken without proper reference to the existing literature. Going through the references on the English Journey to the West page, two of the major English translations (Waley and Yu) use 'Tripitaka'. Jenner uses 'Sanzang', and occasionally "the Tang Priest" (i.e. Tang Seng). Note that none of them use 'Tang Sanzang'. In the academic literature cited in the wiki article, Dudbridge uses Tripitaka and Xuanzang, but often uses the former to indicate the character. Ropp uses Xuanzang (Hsuan-tsang). Plaks uses Xuanzang. Hsia uses Tripitaka. I couldn't find a copy of Kao's paper online. Again, none use 'Tang Sanzang'. Moreover, the impression given above by Timmyshin that the use of Tang Sanzang in the original novel is on par with Tang Seng is inaccurate. He is most commonly referred to as Tang Seng, as a quick search will reveal. On ctext, a search of Journey to the West for Tang Seng gives 66 pages of results. Tang Sanzang gives six pages. Incidentally, Xuanzang also returns six pages. Sanzang (without the 'Tang') returns 70 pages of results. While not all mentions of 'sanzang' refer to the monk, most do. However, this to my mind only supports 'Tripitaka', which is what 'Sanzang' means (or rather, sanzang is a Chinese translation of the Sanskrit term tripiṭaka). While my personal preference is to use the most common Mandarin Chinese term for China-related articles, I don't think the case has been properly been made here for using 'Tang Sanzang'. These decisions should be based on the commonly used term in reliable English sources, which does appear to be 'Tripitaka'. If there is a need to distinguish between this one and the Tripitaka wiki page, then the most common name used in the original novel is Tang Seng (the Tang monk), which I understand is a rather vague term for an article title. In English, Xuanzang appears to be the most common name after Tripitaka in the secondary literature, and the other big translation of the novel in English (Jenner) uses Sanzang. As the move request occured two years ago, I thought it would make sense to have another discussion about it. I would be interested to hear your thoughts. Retinalsummer (talk) 11:39, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Name again again
Sadly, no one was interested that Tang Seng is most commonly known as Tripitaka in English translations, but now I note another issue with nomenclature. Before I edited it, the lead had been expanded to three paragraphs about Tang Seng's various names. The lead should give an introduction to the subject of the article, not an exhaustive account of what names the subject is known by. The page already has an infobox with his aliases, so this detail is excessive and unnecessary. There is already a long section discussing his names on the Xuanzang page and I see no reason to repeat all that here. I've edited the lead to conform with wiki standards, and I've also edited the page to conform to standards on the use of Chinese characters and diacritics for pinyin. I've also removed the recently introduced italics on proper names - not sure why someone made those changes. Finally, at the moment, the Historical Background section rather confusingly spends more time relating stories from the novel instead of history, which needs to be changed. Retinalsummer (talk) 13:52, 11 May 2023 (UTC)