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Xiyou ji (Journey to the West) is a novel based on the historical trip of Tripitaka Master Xuanzang of the Tang Dynasty, describing his daunting pilgrimage to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures. Xiyou ji is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. The story contains abundant philosophical principles with underlying intentions of the author and has been widely interpreted with different views due to different experiences of readers since ancient times. This paper borrows the intriguing storyline of Xiyou ji to unfold the Buddhist principle of Consciousness-Only that Master Xuanzang put all his effort into propagating, and to delineate the path of cultivation for Buddhist practitioners. This paper gives a general idea about the hidden metaphors of Consciousness-Only within the characters of Tang Zeng (Tang Monk) and his disciples in the novel. It also discusses the possibility of going astray on the path of cultivation and how that relates to the contents of the novel.

This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtra translations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and pedagogical practices. By the late sixth century, it began to mean something like “Buddhist verse.” Over the course of the Tang, gāthās came to take on the formal features of poetry, eventually becoming all but indistinguishable from elite verse. However, the word gāthā was always seen as something inferior to real poetry, and, by the late Tang, we find poet-monks belittling other monks’ didactic verses so as to distinguish their own work and avoid the taint of the word gāthā. Cet article explore l’évolution du sens du terme gāthā (ch. ji) sur une période s’étendant sur plus de huit cent ans, depuis les premières traductions des sūtra en chinois jusqu’au milieu du dixième siècle. Bien que ce terme désignât à l’origine les parties rimées des textes sacrés bouddhiques, les gāthās très tôt commencèrent à circuler indépendamment et à être employées dans les pratiques rituelles, contemplatives et pédagogiques. Vers la fin du sixième siècle, il devint synonyme de « poésie bouddhique ». Au cours de la dynastie des Tang, les gāthās adoptèrent les règles formelles de la poésie, si bien qu’ils devinrent quasiment identiques aux autres formes d’expression poétique des élites. Le mot gāthā cependant continua à évoquer un style inférieur à celui de la « vraie » poésie, et à la fin des Tang des moines-poètes moquèrent les vers didactiques composés par d’autres moines dans le but de distinguer leur propres compositions et de se démarquer des connotations peu flatteuses du terme gāthā.

In this paper, different aspects of the relation between Buddhism and the Buddhist Chinese literature and the linguistic study of Chinese will be at issue. The introduction of Buddhism and the Buddhist literature not only introduced new methods for the traditional Chinese linguistic analyses, particularly, the analysis of the phonology of Chinese, but also new styles of writing. The highly educated translators of Buddhist texts into Chinese, who frequently were not native speakers of Chinese, developed a writing style which on the one hand displayed a strong influence from their traditional Chinese education, but on the other hand attempted to appeal to less formally educated readers and a more general audience, in order to achieve missionary success. Consequently, the Buddhist Chinese literature, though it is predominantly written in a variety of the literary Chinese language wenyan 文言, displays a number of grammatical features which most likely reflect the vernacular language spoken at the time of the translation. Since all documents genuinely Chinese from the latter part of the Han period on (first century CE) are written in the wenyan language, our knowledge about any spoken variety of Chinese in the first millennium of the Common Era would be non-existent without these Buddhist texts. Accordingly, the study of Buddhist Chinese texts is most relevant for the study of the history of the Chinese language; the only entirely vernacular corpus is actually the Buddhist bianwen 變文 collection found in Dunhuang.

This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and pedagogical practices. By the late sixth century, it began to mean something like “Buddhist verse.” Over the course of the Tang, gāthās came to take on the formal features of poetry, eventually becoming all but indistinguishable from elite verse. However, the word gāthā was always seen as something inferior to real poetry, and, by the late Tang, we find poet-monks belittling other monks’ didactic verses so as to distinguish their own work and avoid the taint of the word gāthā. Résumé: Cet article explore l’évolution du sens du terme gāthā (ch. ji) sur une période s’étendant sur plus de huit cent ans, depuis les premières traductions des sūtra en chinois jusqu’au milieu du dixième siècle. Bien que ce terme désignât à l’origine les parties rimées des textes sacrés bouddhiques, les gāthās très tôt commencèrent à circuler indépendamment et à être employées dans les pratiques rituelles, contemplatives et pédagogiques. Vers la fin du sixième siècle, il devint synonyme de « poésie bouddhique ». Au cours de la dynastie des Tang, les gāthās adoptèrent les règles formelles de la poésie, si bien qu’ils devinrent quasiment identiques aux autres formes d’expression poétique des élites. Le mot gāthā cependant continua à évoquer un style inférieur à celui de la « vraie » poésie, et à la fin des Tang des moines-poètes moquèrent les vers didactiques composés par d’autres moines dans le but de distinguer leur propres compositions et de se démarquer des connotations peu flatteuses du terme gāthā.

Master Xuanzang is a prominent, highly esteemed monk in Chinese Buddhist history. Master Xuanzang's most distinguished achievement was the long and perilous pilgrimage he took to India to obtain a large quantity of Buddhist scriptures, many of which he translated into Chinese. In addition to enriching the collection of Chinese Buddhist scriptures, these Mahayana sutras and treatises are reliable sources attesting to bodhisattvas' awakening. Moreover, with the Yogacara school's all-inclusive cognition of Consciousness-Only, Buddhist practitioners gained significant advancement in both Buddhist insight knowledge and logic. Master Xuanzang also established the True Consciousness-Only Realization and clarified the contents of Buddhsit cultivation regarding the eight forms of consciousness (vijnana). Xiyou ji (Journey to the West) is one of the Four Great Chinese Novels in Chinese literature. This Chinese classic uses the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang's legendary pilgrimage to India as its backdrop and incorporated folklore and social events of the time into its storyline. This paper analyzes the characters of Xiyou ji from the perspective of Yogacara theory of eight consciosunesses.