Journey to the West Read online

  Before the story proper begins, there is a long section which has nothing to do with the monk or his mission, but deals with the exploits of the Stone Monkey, who has learnt an amazing range of skills, including the seventy-two transformations and the secret of immortality, and who claims the title of Great Sage, the Equal of Heaven. His major characteristics are his cheekiness and guts: afraid of no one, irreverent towards everyone, including the Jade Emperor of the Taoists and even Buddha himself, whom he derides as “a perfect fool” until he learns better. He causes havoc in heaven, and eventually the Jade Emperor calls on Buddha’s help. He is then trapped under a mountain for five hundred years.

  The introduction is followed by the story of how Guanyin, known throughout the Western world as the Goddess of Mercy, is instructed by Buddha himself to bring the scriptures to save lost souls to China, which in the novel is portrayed as being in desperate need of such guidance (reflecting, by the way, the attitude of the Indian monks to China in The Record of Western Regions). Guanyin gives this task to the monk Xuanzang, and provides him with three protectors, a monkey, a pig, and a sand spirit. Here we learn that the monk had a past life, in which he was the Golden Cicada, a favorite disciple of Buddha, who failed to pay attention during a sermon and was punished by being reincarnated in China. His disciples are not ordinary monkeys or pigs either: they had all formerly been spirits with official positions in the Celestial Palace of the Jade Emperor, but for various reasons offended their rulers and were sent to earth as punishment. Part-human, part-something-else, they seek to regain their previous status, and agreed to help Xuanzang as an atonement for their sins. The monk undertakes this mission for a variety of reasons. One, of course, is to bring enlightenment to the lost souls of China. Another reason is also to fulfill a vow made by Emperor Taizong, who has seen Hell and ransomed himself out on condition that he would establish a Society for the Salvation of Lost Souls. This provides a secular, as well as spiritual, justification for the trials for the journey.

  The last three chapters of the novel describe Xuanzang’s entry into Paradise and his return to earth to bring the holy scriptures to China, after which he attains Buddhahood. Between the introductory section and the final conclusion there are 86 chapters. In each of these, the pilgrims are confronted with various demons and monsters, fight with them, defeat them, and continue the journey. Many of the stories extend over several chapters. The geography of The Record of Western Regions is real, including modern Xinjiang, Afghanistan, and India; the geography of the novel is a series of kingdoms of barbarians with strange customs, suspicious temples, and monasteries where danger usually lurks, or mountains and ravines inhabited by demons who live on human flesh. These are usually anxious to eat Xuanzang himself, as his holiness would confer immortality. The demons, too, have previous lives: they are usually animal spirits in semi-human form. Apart from the demons, there are formidable physical trials: raging rivers, burning mountains, a kingdom ruled by amazons, the land of spider spirits and so on. After a pilgrimage said to have taken fourteen years, they arrive at the half-real, half-legendary destination of Vulture Peak, where Xuanzang meets Buddha, and explains his mission. Buddha is gracious but a bit condescending; he tells his assistants to provide the Chinese travelers with some sutras, but they cheat them, giving them blank sheets of paper. The last chapter describes the return journey to China (flying with celestial messengers, not on foot as in the real story) and a final trial, where they almost lose the scriptures in the fictionalized version of the crossing of the Indus. Here the elephant becomes a tortoise, and the river separating India from China becomes the demarcation line between the Land of Bliss in Paradise and the land of unenlightened souls on earth. They stay on earth only for long enough to deliver the scriptures to the Tang emperor, after which they are returned to Paradise and their just rewards.

  (3) DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The only characters who appear regularly throughout the book are the monk, the monkey and the pig. The horse, a former dragon who has also fallen from grace, is sometimes considered a fourth disciple but rarely appears. His job is less to defend the Master than to carry him to India, and carry the scriptures back to China. The various demons they meet along the way are dealt with and usually not mentioned again, though there are occasionally some references to earlier adventures. There are also a number of supernatural actors of both Buddhist and Taoist persuasion who get involved in both celestial and earthly matters from time to time. These are:

  (1) The Jade Emperor: a Taoist deity, he lives in the Celestial Palace. He is served by a bureaucracy rather like an earthly one, but his ministers are various spirits, stars, and planets.

  (2) The Queen of Heaven, the queen of the female immortals. Another inhabitant of the Celestial Palace. Her garden contained the peach of immortality, which bloomed only once in three thousand years. She could confer immortality on her guests at her peach banquets.

  (3) The Ancient of Days, an unusual and memorable name for the Patriarch, a disciple of Buddha, but in the novel seems to be in the Taoist camp. A sort of adviser and ambassador at large.

  (4) The Minister of Venus and the Minister of Jupiter: personifications of the spirits of these planets. Their role is rather like the ministers in a Chinese traditional bureaucracy.

  (5) Yama, the King of Hell; Judge Cui, the Chief Judge of Hell, the Ten Judges of Hell; Guardian King Li and his sons Nezha and Mucha, various Messengers and other servants: other officials in the nether world of folk religion where the doctrines and spirits of Buddhism and Taoism become very blurred.

  (6) The Buddha. In the novel he was many names: The Incarnate Model, the Ideal, the Buddha to Come, the Cosmic Buddha, Maitreya, Tatagatha, and many others. The historical Buddha was a real person, referred to in the novel as Shakyamuni. Buddha appears early in the novel to help the Taoist Jade Emperor suppress the Monkey, and reminds him of his rather insignificant place in the grand scheme of things: when the Monkey thinks he can jump as far as the end of the universe, he finds he has not left the palm of the Buddha. This is the theme of one of the most common bronze curios available in the flea markets of modern Beijing. Buddha appears from time to time, but mainly at the end of the novel, where he presents the true scriptures to the monk for the salvation of lost souls in the Middle Kingdom in the East.

  (7) Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. Her Chinese name means “She who hears the sounds of misery of the world.” In some ways the architect of the whole enterprise: Guanyin seeks permission from Buddha to bring enlightenment to the people of the East, which coincides with the vow of the Chinese emperor to found a society for the salvation of lost souls. Whenever in trouble he cannot manage, the Monkey appeals to Guanyin, who comes to the rescue. It is in Guanyin’s interests that the mission succeeds, despite finding the tactics of the Monkey and the others a bit distasteful from time to time.

  (8) Ananda and Kasyapa: the major disciples of the Buddha, presented in an unflattering light in this novel. They expect to be paid for the scriptures Xuanzang has sacrificed so much to obtain for the benefit of others, and when Monkey threatens to make a fuss, give them scrolls of “wordless sutras”—plain paper. The pilgrims only discover this when they have left, and eventually Buddha’s disciples supply them with written scriptures, on the grounds that their level of enlightenment was not enough to enable them to understand the wordless ones.

  (9) The Emperor Taizong. Apart from the monk, the only human and historically real character in the book. The second emperor of the Tang, he is widely considered the greatest emperor in Chinese history. When Xuanzang set off on his journey, there was a ban on all travel to the interior because of the general military chaos of the time, but when Xuanzang returned in 645 his fame had come before him, and he was warmly welcomed by Taizong, in both the novel and in historical fact. Incidentally, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda that we can now visit in Xi’an is not the pagoda built for Xuanzang, in which he translated the scriptures into Chinese. This was made of mud and clay, and decayed within fifty years. The present structure was rebuilt by Empress Wu Zetian (625-705), and has been partially destroyed and repaired several times.

  (10) The real Xuanzang is described in his biography written by Huili. The fictional Tang monk is true to the ideals of abstinence, vegetarianism, and refusal to take life, so Guanyin provides him with three powerful disciples who look after the messier side of life for him. In the novel he is typically attacked, either by demons who want to eat him or women who want to seduce him. He cannot defend himself: that is what the disciples are there for. But he is continuously frustrated at the lack of seriousness and dedication of the disciples: the Monkey is violent and rebellious, and quits several times; the Pig is lazy and always in search of food or pretty women. These altercations between the Monk, the Pig, and the Monkey also provide much of the material of the novel that is not dealing with external threats, but internal ones. Xuanzang has a clear and unwavering sense of mission, which provides the novel with a unifying theme.

  (11) Sun Wukong. Originally called the Stone Monkey, he becomes the Monkey King, the Seeker of Secrets, the Pilgrim, and Sun Wukong, “Aware of Emptiness.” Born of a rock, he established himself as Monkey King by showing his courage in entering the Waterfall Cave at the Flower and Fruit Mountain, where no other monkey dared to go. After some time he became restless and went in search of adventure. He caused so much trouble in Heaven that the Four Heavenly Kings and Nezha, the son of Guardian King Li, leading an army of a hundred thousand celestial soldiers, tried to defeat him, without success. Fearless and irreverent of everybody, he upset many Taoist and Buddhist deities, so the Jade Emperor sought the help of Buddha. He was imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years, and only rescued when Xuanzang came by him on his pilgrimage and accepted him as a disciple. The meeting was really arranged by Guanyin, of course. He is always depicted with his staff, named “As You Like It,” which was originally a pillar supporting the Palace of the Dragon King. This staff, together with his devouring of the peaches of immortality and his ordeal in the eight trigram furnace, which gave him a steel hard body and fiery golden eyes, makes Sun Wukong pretty much invincible. He can only be controlled by a cap of spikes placed around his head by Guanyin, which he cannot remove by himself. The mantra that can tighten the spikes around his head is about the only thing Monkey is scared of, and is Xuanzang’s final resort to try to bring his obstreperous disciple to heel.

  (12) Zhu Bajie, also known as Zhu the Pig, or Zhu Wuneng “Aware of Ability.” He is usually called Zhu Bajie, the “Eight Prohibitions,” a name given him by Guanyin to remind him of his Buddhist vows, so much in contrast with his natural inclinations. Richard translated the term as the Eight Commandments. Once an immortal who was a commander of 100,000 soldiers of the River of Heaven, he drank too much and attempted to flirt with Chang’e, the moon goddess (or “the fairies”, as Richard translates), resulting in his banishment into the mortal world. He was supposed to be reborn as a human, but ended up in the womb of a sow, and he was born half-man half-pig. In the original Chinese novel, he is often called daizi, meaning “idiot.” His weapon is the “nine-tooth iron rake.” He and the Monkey seem to be constantly engaged in a sort of game of one-upmanship, and this rivalry provides some of the funniest scenes in the novel.

  (13) Sha the Monk, or Sha Wujing “Awakened to Purity.” He was exiled to the mortal world and made to look like a monster because he accidentally smashed a crystal goblet at a heavenly banquet. He lives in the River of Quicksand, where he terrorizes travelers trying to cross the river, and occasionally eats them. This is the reason he is often depicted with a necklace of skulls, as in the Japanese television series. He is also persuaded to join the pilgrimage. Like Monkey, who knows 72 transformations, and the Pig, who knows 36, he knows 18. His weapon is the Crescent Moon Shovel, and he is usually depicted with it. Compared with the others he is well behaved, obedient, and reliable, but a bit morose and prone to worrying. At the end of the journey he is made an arhat in Paradise, while the Pig is made Official Altar Cleanser, meaning he gets to eat the offerings on every Buddhist altar throughout the country. It is hard to imagine a more perfect image of Paradise for the Pig than that.

  (14) The bodhisattvas were enlightened souls who chose to forego Extinction in order to remain in the world of mortals to use their understanding and wisdom to help other people along the road to enlightenment. The most famous were Avalokitesvara, the Indian prototype of the Chinese Guanyin, and Manjusri, in Chinese Wenshu. Samantabhadra, in Chinese Puxian Pusa, also plays a role in the novel. Pusa is the Chinese form of bodhisattva. The arhats, in Chinese luohan, are disciples of the Buddha who have already attained enlightenment. They have no role to play, but are often mentioned in the context of the inhabitants of the Buddhist Paradise. There are also a variety of messengers, which Richard calls angels, or occasionally seraphim and cherubim, who have minor roles. Other spirits have delightful names such as The Divine Kinsman and the Barefoot Taoist. Demons are sometimes fallen angels or spirits, or in the allegorical sense, the more evil aspects of human nature.

  (4) RICHARD’S TRANSLATION

  The first English translations of the Record of Western Regions and Huili’s Biography of Xuanzang were by Samuel Beal, Records of the Western World, London, 1906, and The Life of Hiuen-tsang, London 1911. Timothy Richard published his translation of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures in 1913. His title and subtitle shows his understanding of the book: “ A Journey to Heaven, being a Chinese Epic and Allegory dealing with the Origin of the Universe, The Evolution of Monkey to Man, The Evolution of Man to the Immortal, and Revealing the Religion, Science, and Magic, which moulded the Life of the Central Ages of Central Asia, and which underlie the Civilization of the Far East to this Day. By Ch’iu Chang-ch’un. A.D. 1208-1288 Born 67 years before Dante.”

  One can scarcely believe this is the same book that Arthur Waley called Monkey, or the basis of the TV series Monkey Magic and the many other adaptations since. But it is, and it is important to understand why. Confucian China, like Victorian England, was a rather moralistic society. Confucian scholars considered novels frivolous, but like their Victorian counterparts, were not adverse to a bit of nonsense every now and then. Nevertheless, all literature, even the most frivolous, had to contain a moral message. This was the intellectual environment Richard was living in.

  To Richard, the moral message of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures was clearly that of the pilgrim struggling against internal and external demons towards enlightenment. Richard was a Baptist missionary, born in 1845 and first assigned to Yantai, in Shandong. He became the editor of the Wanguo Gongbao, known in English as A Review of the Times, a reformist journal founded by the American Methodist missionary Young J. Allen. Its subject matter ranged from discussions on the politics of Western nation states to the virtues and advantages of Christianity. It attracted a wide and influential Chinese readership throughout its thirty-nine year run from 1868 to 1907. The Qing reformer Kang Youwei said of the publication: “I owe my conversion to reform chiefly on the writings of two missionaries, the Rev. Timothy Richard and the Rev. Dr. Young J. Allen.” Kang Youwei and his student Liang Qichao are generally regarded as the most important reformers in late Qing China. Richard was a prolific writer and translator, and one of the most influential missionaries of his day, often ranked with and compared to Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission.

  Although a committed Christian missionary, Richard was fundamentally an internationalist, and fervently believed in the cause of modernization. He did not share the general view of the missionaries that Christianity was the only revealed Truth from God; rather, he argued, Christianity and the major Chinese religions, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, had much in common. Some of these communalities were superficial, like vestments and rituals; others were deeper, including the urge to seek spiritual enlightenment and the belief in a Higher Power, known by different names in different religions, but essentially the same. Richard did not insist that converts burn their tablets to their ancestors: one could be a good Christian and show respect to ones’ ancestors, with the appropriate rites, without any conflict. This showed an attitude similar to that of Matteo Ricci in the Ming, but differed from most of the missionaries of his day.

  The Wanguo Gongbao was extremely influential amongst the Chinese educated classes, and Richard mixed with high officials easily. Clearly he knew Chinese very well, and was well versed in Chinese literature and history, which would have made him even more respected by the Chinese literati. Despite the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion, during which many thousands of Christians had been murdered, he believed that the Chinese educated classes were not fundamentally opposed to the West, or to scientific progress, or to Christianity itself. So he must have been delighted to discover The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures. Many of its themes resonated with his own intuitions: the Three Religions are One, and respect is due to all of them. To this Richard offered his own insight: moreover, many of the characteristics of the Chinese religions, Mahayana Buddhism in particular, are shared with Christianity. Richard thought he had discovered the connection in The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures. The other issue Richard was passionate about was that scientific thought was not foreign to the Chinese tradition; was that there was a tradition of scientific knowledge in China, and the evidence was in The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures.