Talk:Tang Sanzang

This article was nominated for deletion on 24 July 2012 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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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.

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]