Xuánzàng 玄奘 (lay surname Chén, given name Wěi 褘; honorific titles 三藏法師 Sānzàng Fǎshī “Tripiṭaka Dharma-Master”, 大遍覺 Dà-biàn-jué “the Great Pervading-Awakening”, 大乘天 Dà-shèng-tiān / Mahāyānadeva, 解脫天 Jiě-tuō-tiān / Mokṣadeva; DILA Authority A000294; 602–5 February 664) was the most celebrated of all Chinese pilgrim-translators and one of the most influential figures in the entire history of East Asian Buddhism. The biographical sources are the Dà Táng Dà Cí’ēn-sì Sānzàng Fǎshī zhuàn 大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳 (T2053) by his disciples Huìlì 慧立 and Yàncóng 彥悰, and his own travel-memoir Dà Táng Xīyù jì 大唐西域記 (T2087, completed 646).
Born to a Confucian-scholar family in Hénán 河南, he was ordained in his youth and travelled north to Cháng’ān to study Yogācāra under Jìzàng 吉藏. Dissatisfied with the available translations, he resolved to travel to India for further study. Despite imperial prohibition, he set out in Zhēnguān 貞觀 3 (629), travelling overland through the Tarim Basin, Sogdiana, Bactria, and Gandhāra to Nālandā in central India, where he studied for some five years under Śīlabhadra. He returned to Cháng’ān in Zhēnguān 19 (645) with 657 Sanskrit manuscripts and was received with extraordinary honour by Táng Tàizōng 唐太宗.
He then established a translation bureau at the Hóngfú-sì 弘福寺 and later at the Cí’ēn-sì 慈恩寺 and at the Yùhuá-sì 玉華寺, where he produced over the following 19 years a translation corpus of some 76 works in 1,347 fascicles — the largest single contribution to the Chinese canon by any individual translator. Among his major translations: the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra (T220, in 600 fascicles), the Yogācārabhūmi (T1579, in 100 fascicles), the Abhidharma-mahāvibhāṣā (T1545, in 200 fascicles), the Vijñaptimātratā-siddhi (T1585), the Heart Sūtra (T251), the [[KR6a0124|Yuán-qǐ jīng 緣起經]] (T124), and many others. He died at the Yùhuá-sì at the age of 62.