Journey to the West (西遊記) or Xīyóujì) is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Our Indian guide quoted the book many times, saying that many of the holy Buddhist sites we visited were located with the help of the book. As far as I know however, Journey to the West is just a novel, a fictionalized account of the legends around a real Buddhist monk Xuánzàng's pilgrimage to India during the Táng dynasty to obtain religious texts called sutras. The real XuánZàng was of course a scholar, traveler, and translator and had recorded his seventeen year overland trip to India and back, in detail in his autobiography. I believe it must be through these recorded work that the holy sites were identified. Journey to the West has been adapted into movies, TV series and cartoons for as long as I could remember and in all these media, XuánZàng was depicted as always wearing a distinctive orange and red robe. I suppose that was why, I started muttering to everyone who cared to listen, Xīyóujì, Xīyóujì when we chanced across a delegation of monks from Taiwan. I bet you'd probably do the same thing too!A delegation of monks from Taiwan...
