The Translation Bureau and the Consciousness-Only School

Xuanzang returned in 645 to a hero's welcome. The emperor Taizong, who had once forbidden his journey, now wanted him as an adviser; Xuanzang declined office and asked instead for the means to translate what he had brought back. The state gave him a bureau of scholar-monks, and for the last two decades of his life he ran one of the most productive translation projects in the history of religion, rendering on the order of seventy-five works and well over a thousand fascicles of Sanskrit text into Chinese.

His translations were prized for a new precision, and some reshaped Chinese Buddhism. He produced the version of the short Heart Sutra that East Asia still chants, and in 650 the Bhaishajyaguru (Medicine Buddha) Sutra that carried that healing cult through China, Korea and Japan. From the Yogacara texts he assembled the Cheng weishi lun and founded the Faxiang, or "Consciousness-Only," school, the most rigorously philosophical of the Chinese Buddhist traditions. Alongside the scriptures he dictated the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (646), a survey of the roughly one hundred and thirty countries he had seen or heard of, a work later used by archaeologists to relocate lost Buddhist sites in India, and the seed of the fantastical Ming novel Journey to the West.