Legend has it that the Tang Priest is the reincarnation of the golden cicada, and after ten years of practice, he can finally be refined. However, during the reign of Li Shimin, the king of the Tang Dynasty, there were great problems in the ideology of the residents in the whole Tang Dynasty. In order to change the ideological consciousness of all people in Dongsheng Shenzhou, the western Tathagata Buddha hoped that a Taoist monk would go to the western paradise to obtain the true scriptures. Faced with severe challenges, Tang Priest volunteered to learn from the West.

The prototype of Tang priest

The Tang Priest in history, surnamed Chen, was born in 604 AD. He was born in the Tang Dynasty and became a monk at the age of thirteen. His legal name is Xuanzang. Xuanzang has been eager to learn since he was a child. In order to study Buddhist scriptures, he traveled all over Sichuan, Hubei, Henan, Shaanxi and other places to visit famous Buddhist scholars.

However, there are many Buddhist sects, and there are many mistakes in the translation of Buddhist scriptures, and the meanings of explanations are often contradictory. The deeper you drill, the more problems you find. He decided to go to Tianzhu, the birthplace of Buddhism (now the Indian Peninsula) to find out.

So in the Zhenguan period of the Tang Dynasty, he quietly embarked on the road to the west. He went through many hardships along the way and finally reached Tianzhu. After more than ten years of hard study, he finally learned. Finally, he returned to the Tang Dynasty and became the most respected monk at that time. The story of Tang Priest's pilgrimage to the West is based on Xuanzang's westward journey.