In light of Nalanda

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.