Achievements
The Journey to the West is one of the world’s great comic adventure novels, a major religious epic, and an amusing and instructive satire on human foibles. In compiling and shaping materials that by the sixteenth century had a rich tradition of their own, Wu Chengen gave them their definitive form, a form that has remained unrivaled by later variations on the story. The imaginative force of this quest by a magic monkey, a pig, a river monster, and a monk to bring Buddhist scriptures back from India can be seen in The Journey to the West cartoons, comic books, and cut-paper pictures still popular in China (and Japan) today. The modern Westerner who has the opportunity to attend a performance by a “Chinese opera” troupe is likely to see a scene from one of the plays that were part of the evolution of the novel, and he or she is almost certain to be captivated by the spectacle of the monkey-king’s acrobatic antics.
The novel is also one of the works that mark the sixteenth century in China as a heyday for fiction written in the language of the people. For at least five centuries, stories in the vernacular had been told in the marketplaces by professional storytellers, despite the official view of the educated class that fiction, and anything not written in the difficult language of the classics, did not deserve the status of “literature.” (Westerners might compare the situation to that of medieval Europe before Dante, when serious writing was done not in French or Italian or Spanish but in Latin.) Love stories, tales of heroism, and narratives about human encounters with the supernatural came to be written down and printed, perhaps as “promptbooks” for the storytellers or perhaps as imitations of such promptbooks for members of the literate middle class—and for some of the literati in their leisure hours.
There existed also an even older tradition of popular Buddhist sermons and homilies that used secular, and sometimes sensational, subject matter to compete with the marketplace storytellers for the attention of busy passersby. The Journey to the West, in its use of such traditional techniques as interpolated poems and direct address to the audience/reader (“If you want to know what happened, you must listen to what is told in the next chapter”), applies the achievements of these generations of anonymous makers of fictions to a work of a high order of literary art. The poems are especially deserving of attention, though they were omitted by Arthur Waley from his translation: Wu’s gift for casting description, narration, and commentary into well-crafted verse gave great strength to the work.
Another of the author’s achievements was the skill with which he arranged existing materials and gave to them the tone, the unifying perspective, the fascinating characterizations, and the structure that they have retained for future generations. The sources of The Journey to the West have indeed drawn a great deal of scholarly attention, but it is clear that, whatever the degree of development of his immediate source or sources, Wu did not merely copy; he effectively manipulated the materials for his poetic, comic, and descriptive ends. As Andrew Plaks points out, The Journey to the West is not so much the retelling of a popular story as the transformation of that story into the vehicle for the important message of Tripitaka’s beloved Heart Sutra, “Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form.”
The Journey to the West has been read and loved by schoolchildren and by scholars from the Ming Dynasty to the post-Mao Zedong era. It stands with Lo Kuanchung’s San-kuo chih yen-I (fourteenth century; The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1925), his Shui-hu chuan (fourteenth century; All Men Are Brothers, 1933; also known as Water Margin, 1937), and the anonymous Chin P’ing Mei (sixteenth century; The Golden Lotus, 1939; also known as Chin P’ing Mei: The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and His Six Wives, 1940) as the Four Great and Wondrous Books of the efflorescence of Chinese fiction during the Ming Dynasty, and it rivals even Cao Xueqin’s superlative Hongloumeng (1792; Dream of the Red Chamber, 1958; also translated as The Story of the Stone, 1973-1980, and A Dream of Red Mansions, 1978-1980) in the affection it inspires in its readers. Perhaps it is the most accessible work of Chinese literature for the foreign reader; certainly, it invites stimulating comparisons with Western allegories, epics, and satiric narratives.
Although subject to a wide variety of thought-provoking allegorical interpretations—psychological, religious, Marxist-Maoist—the book can be read with simple delight (especially in Waley’s abridged version) by a bright eleven-year-old who wants a good story. To what extent the materials of the novel were of the author’s own invention and to what extent they were rather a well-used inheritance may never be determined, but his work in creating The Journey to the West as we know it was invaluable, and the world’s readers are in his debt.
Biography
The attribution of The Journey to the West to Wu Chengen has been questioned. In fact, the preface to the oldest extant printed text of the novel claims that the identity of the author was unknown, and the earliest known identification of Wu as the author appeared about forty years after his death (c. 1582). This situation is not, however, uncommon in the history of Chinese fiction, for the publication of work not in the literary language was once considered to be “beneath” an educated person: Many works in the vernacular were published anonymously or under pen names. Nevertheless, most of the novel read today seems to be the work of one person, and what evidence there is points clearly to Wu.
Wu was a minor official of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). His biographies tell us that he was a “native” of the Shanyang district in Huai’an Prefecture, which is today part of Jiangsu (sometimes spelled Kiangsu) Province. This does not necessarily mean that he was actually born in Shanyang, but rather that this district, which is located in the lower Yangtze (or Chang) River basin north of modern Shanghai, was his family’s ancestral home. He seems to have spent most of his life in this central coastal region, however, and The Journey to the West includes many phrases in the dialect of Huai’an. For about eight years, when he was in his forties, Wu lived in Beijing, the capital, but, as Liu Ts’un-yan suggests, he may have preferred life in the central Yangtze city of Nanjing or in the provinces.
Wu was born into a line of educated men, though economic need forced his father to forgo scholarship for business. In 1544, Wu received an academic degree, known as tribute student; he had passed the preliminary examination and had earned the rank of xiu zai a decade earlier. The civil service was the career of most literary men in traditional China, and Wu’s efforts to secure a post finally succeeded when he was given the position of assistant magistrate of the Changxing district in what is now Zhejiang Province, a few hundred miles south of his home. He retired at the end of the 1560’s to a life of “wine and poetry,” the conventional pursuits of a slightly nonconformist gentleman of leisure. His biographers note that, though he was married to a woman from an influential family, he had no surviving sons. Liu points out that Wu’s childhood observations of his mother’s problematic status as a concubine may have led him to eschew the common practice of taking a concubine of his own in order to produce an heir.
In a biography recorded roughly a century after his death, Wu is described as being quite intelligent and a voracious reader. As a child, he read popular fiction and historical romances on the sly, despite the efforts of his father and his tutor to restrict his reading to the orthodox classics that were the basis of a traditional Confucian education. The brief autobiographical passage in one of Wu’s essays that mentions this also explains that his taste for the supernatural and his urge to write short fiction comparable to the “strange tales” of the bygone Tang Dynasty grew strong in his early adulthood. Evidently, he published a collection of such stories, but it no longer exists. Wu associated with some of the leading literary men and aesthetes of his day, but in his own lifetime, his reputation seems to have been based chiefly on his talents as calligrapher, satirist, and writer of elegant poetry. It may be that while he was alive The Journey to the West circulated only in manuscript. One sign of his fame is his appearance in the local histories of Shanyang and Huai’an in the centuries after his death.
Analysis: The Journey to the West
The Journey to the West pleases; it includes slapstick humor, sly satire, eerie monsters such as the Cadaver Demon, marvelous battles, and adventures in countries as odd as Lilliput or Brobdingnag—places such as the Women Nation, Serpent Coil Mountain, and Mysterious Flower Cave. The main characters are an amusing mix: a complaining holy man, an all-too-human pig, a vague but friendly river monster, and the magical king of the monkeys, who calls himself The Great Sage Equal to Heaven and gets into trouble because he refuses to knuckle under to the celestial hierarchy. Their goal is not reached until near the book’s end, and the pilgrims’ return to China is supernaturally swift.
The novel has a didactic message as well. Before considering what it has to say about human nature, society, and religion, however, it will be useful to consider the centuries-long evolution of its plot and its characters. Much of the novel’s richness is the result of the author’s wide-ranging perspective, but much, too, is the result of the variety of its long, multilayered development.
Structure
One major strand of materials around which the story grew is the official biographies and the popular hagiographies of a seventh century monk, Xuanzang, who came to be known as T’ang San-tsang, or Tripitaka. Both the first name (which is Chinese) and the second (which is Sanskrit, the language of the Buddhist scriptures) honor him for the sutras he brought back from India to China. Works such as the Ta T’ang San-tsang ch’ü ching shih-hua (thirteenth century), the story, with poems, of how the Tang Dynasty monk Tripitaka obtained the scriptures, sketch in a few of the events and themes that appear elsewhere in the tradition, most fully in Wu’s The Journey to the West itself. Yet numerous brief tales and fragments recorded earlier suggest the gradual accretion of fantastic motifs onto the historical Tripitaka’s journey, which—rigorous though it was—was actually only one of many made by devout Chinese west and south to the homeland of Buddhism.
In The Journey to the West and its immediate forebears, the Tripitaka tales are mingled with motifs from many legends about magic monkeys. It has been suggested that The Journey to the West shows influence from Indian, Tibetan, or Central Asian epics that tell about monkeys of mythic power, and certainly some sharing of themes among the cultures must have taken place, but native Chinese stories also abound with supernatural apes, some of which do acts of religious merit and some of which are evil and must be controlled. (Clearly, both aspects of the indigenous tradition find expression in Wu’s Monkey.) Moreover, the evidence suggests that the written transmission to China of figures such as India’s Hanuman, the monkey-hero of the Rāmāyana (c. 350 b.c.e.) epic, was limited. What influence there was, then, seems most likely to have been minor. Perhaps the metaphor of ape for human is not so far-fetched that it could not be thought of more than once.
In any case, these two main characters—the pilgrim monk and his unruly monkey disciple—appear together long before the composition of Wu’s novel. Fragments of dramas dating from the thirteenth century, and a fourteenth century cycle of plays in twenty-four acts called Hsi-yu chi tza-chü (the journey to the west variety shows), suggest the range and shape of the novel to come. There still exist two short narratives in the vernacular that, because they were published well before Wu’s lifetime yet show marked similarities to passages in The Journey to the West, reveal that Wu must have worked from an older text or texts in creating his novel. The two shorter versions of The Journey to the West that were published about the same time as Wu’s may have been sources for his work or may have been abridgments of it.
There is a further textual problem that affects the modern reader’s experience of the novel. The text now ascribed to Wu today includes as its ninth chapter a pious biography of Tripitaka, which may seem somewhat at odds in tone with the rest of the book. This chapter does not appear in the 1592 edition of The Journey to the West. Probably it was added later from the wealth of materials about the life of the monk, yet the chapter’s appearance in one of the contemporaneous shorter versions mentioned above suggests the possibility of a full version, written by Wu and circulated in his lifetime, that was the basis for an abridgment as well as for the 1592 edition, which for some reason omitted chapter 9. Or perhaps Wu himself—recognizing the need to give the story of Tripitaka’s life before the quest, as he does for the other pilgrims—added chapter 9 after releasing the draft that became the basis for the 1592 edition, though stylistic differences make this seem less likely. In any case, other changes since that date are minor, especially when compared to the textual problems associated with other old Chinese novels.
Plot
The structure of The Journey to the West suggests something of the complexity of its development in the folk tradition; it also reflects the scope of a novel that places human life in the larger context of the supranatural cosmos. The book may be considered to fall into four parts: the early history of the monkey-king (chapters 1 through 7); the origins of Tripitaka and of the quest for the scriptures, which is prefigured by the Chinese emperor’s visit to the underworld (chapters 8 through 12); the pilgrims’ adventures (chapters 13 through 97); and the conclusion of the journey (chapters 98 through 100).
The novel begins with the beginning of the universe. Thus, the reader is reminded of the formless, undifferentiated Chaos that—in the traditional Chinese cosmogony—existed prior to existence. Grafted onto this concept in the opening poem is the Buddhist ideal of enlightenment so important to the book’s development. This is only the first of many instances of Wu’s syncretism, and his blending of elements from the various philosophical and religious schools of his day is a major source of the novel’s satisfying complexity and one reason for its popularity. After the narrative describes the primal cosmic day of 129,600 years, the formation of the physical world begins, and the reader’s attention is directed to a stone stop an axis mundi mountain in the fabulous realms of the paradisiacal Eastern Sea. This immortal stone, which is a kind of microcosm of the universe of space and time, is impregnated by the spiritual energy of the Yin and Yang forces and gives birth to the magic monkey, who recognizes and hence draws on the powers of the “four quarters” (the orderly, created earth) and finally becomes the founder of a nation.
Such is the cosmic frame of reference that gives The Journey to the West its epic scope, its mythic force, and the authority for its central theme of illusion versus reality. Like the invocation to the muse at the beginning of the great epics of the West, this opening links the mundane realm to the divine, and the first chapter’s conclusion, the monkey-king’s acquisition of a name with a strong religious message—he is called Wu-kung, which might be glossed as “one who has become spiritually awakened to the Void that is the true nature of what we take to be reality”—reminds us of the power of language. The name that defines the monkey’s ego is also a sign of the truth that everything, even that ego, is illusion—a truth that the pilgrims, and the reader, will have to journey through ninety-nine more chapters to grasp.
Characters and themes
Monkey has much to learn, or unlearn, however, before the name that so delights him becomes altogether accurate. His qualities are the restlessness and daring of the human mind, and his wondrous abilities—to change his bodily form or to travel to a distant continent in the wink of an eye—suggest the slippery tricks of human fancy. When he overreaches and steals peaches of immortality from the heavenly orchard, magic elixir from the palace of the revered Daoist figure Laozi, and jade juice and ambrosia from a celestial banquet, Monkey must be imprisoned for five hundred years beneath a mountain in the desert borderlands of China, until Tripitaka frees him to serve as a disciple on the quest. So, too, must the mind be controlled, and even after he is freed, “the monkey of the mind,” as he is sometimes called, remains subject to a thin band of metal that literally surrounds his skull and clamps down when Tripitaka finds it necessary—until the novel’s end, when Monkey becomes a Buddha and learns that the band that restricted him has vanished.
Yet there is much of value in Monkey’s energy, once it is civilized. His optimism, his ingenuity in matching his magical transformations to the enemy at hand, his straightforwardness and freedom from inhibitions, his generosity toward his dependents—these qualities are as much a part of his appeal as are his bombast and humor. Central to what makes the reader admire him is his liberation from what muddles more ordinary lives. He views his rights as equal to those of anyone else and simply does not recognize the authority of the heavenly bureaucracy. He has the daring that allows him to step outside society’s limitations; even if those ordering limitations seem necessary for daily life, the individual who finds them at times confining is bound to feel a secret glee at Monkey’s antics. Most important, Monkey maintains the attitude of nonattachment that is central to Buddhist ideals of right thought and action. His attention is not focused on the goal of the quest, on fretting and imagining; rather, he lives in the moment at hand, solving problems when they present themselves, and is therefore liberated from the ill effects of taking this illusory world too seriously.
Tripitaka, for all the reverent description of his piety in chapter 9, falls short of this ideal of nonattachment. His sentimentality arises, forgivably, from his compassion, but he is also guilty of fear. In part, his fears arise from an awareness of his human physical limitations; this causes him to fret over his bodily needs and leaves him sometimes paralyzed and helpless. Worse is his wrongful willingness to believe in the reality of his senses and the false monsters that they create. Thus, in Tripitaka’s first adventure with his new disciple, the monk falls easy prey to the Six Robbers (allegorical representations of those tricksters, the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the mind, and the body), while Monkey wisely laughs them off. Tripitaka, however, does have the great virtue of faith, and he, too, becomes a Buddha at the end—not because he has worked for saintliness, but precisely in spite of his sometimes petty clinging to the letter of monastic law.
Another of Tripitaka’s disciples, the river monster Sha Monk (Sha Wuching, or Sandy) is less sharply characterized, but the fourth pilgrim, Pigsy (Chu Pa-chieh, Wu-neng), is unforgettable. The long poem in which he introduces himself aptly begins: “My mind was dim since the time of my youth;/Always I loved my indolence and sloth.” As Hsia has pointed out, Pigsy represents the ordinary human being who simply wants a comfortable family life. His greed and his lust make him an object of ridicule, yet in the end he is rewarded—not with Buddhahood, for he has not yet detached himself from his passions, but with a comfortable position clearing up the plentiful offerings of food from Buddhist altars. Thus, he is given a situation suitable to his level of spiritual development, as the book concludes with the “everyone in the right place” ending familiar to readers of Western comedies.
The objects of Wu’s satire, then, include the various follies of the pilgrims, and hence of humanity, but that is only the beginning. Early in the novel, when Monkey first leaves his subjects in the monkey kingdom and goes off to learn how to become an immortal, a demon attacks his land; presumably the monkey-folk would not have suffered had their king been fulfilling his social duties rather than seeking personal spiritual growth. Despite Wu’s devout espousal of Buddhist beliefs and the high value he places on the spiritual effects of esoteric Daoist practices, such as internal alchemy and breath-control, he does not hesitate to criticize religious practitioners. The bickering and the fruitless dogmas of various schools are revealed as foolishness when Monkey first becomes a pupil of the Patriarch. The satire goes further: This teacher’s “secret signs” are somewhat laughable, and the one who deciphers them and wins the coveted right to the secret teachings is, after all, an unruly ape.
In contrast to the quarrelsome and selfish would-be holy ones is the simple woodcutter in chapter 1: He points the way to the Patriarch’s cave for Monkey but cannot take time for religious study himself because he has selflessly devoted his life to caring for his aged mother. A similar figure, the tiger hunter who defies all the Buddhist prohibitions against taking life and eating meat, appears at the start of Tripitaka’s journey west; although he breaks religious law, he, too, is portrayed as filial, thoughtful, and helpful.
Sometimes, just as human characteristics such as pride and greed are given animal or monster form, female figures are used in the novel as the embodiments of the temptations of lust and the subtler temptation (see chapters 53 and 54) to reproduce, but this misogynous projection of the human sexual drive onto women alone may be viewed rather as a prejudice of Wu’s culture than as uniquely his. Also, as in the West, this vision of women is oddly accompanied by a female figure of great virtue, Kuan-yin, the motherly and loving Goddess of Mercy.
Critical reception
Fuller analyses of the Buddhist, Daoist, and neo-Confucian allegorical messages of The Journey to the West have been written by Plaks, Yu, Hsia, and a long tradition of Chinese commentators before the present century; there are other possible allegorical readings as well. Certainly, the riotous disruptions of the somewhat pompous courts of the Daoist pantheon or the Dragon King wittily suggest the vulnerability of similar institutions in the human realm. Bureaucratic corruption, too, is given amusingly pointed satiric treatment: It even appears among the divine assistants of the Buddha himself. Several interesting readings of the novel in the light of the Marxist concept of class struggle have been made; these focus on Monkey’s defiance of established authority. The author of the brief essay in a volume edited by Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein (cited in the bibliography) offers a fascinating interpretation of the work from the perspective of developmental psychology. Yet to reduce this multivalent work to any one simplistic allegory is to lose sight of many other meanings.
Still, Wu’s novel does have a central focus, one that allows for a variety of understandings of the characters, their interrelationships, and the true nature of their journey. The main point of the book is clear: This world is unreal, even absurd, and certainly our perceptions of it are not to be trusted. What we call “reality” shifts and deceives us; the laws of nature may apply to hapless, nervous, human Tripitaka, but not to enlightened beings such as Monkey. To realize this, however, is not to despair; rather, it is to achieve the kind of relaxed acceptance that is modeled by the novel’s narrator. If society’s hierarchies are to be questioned and if Tripitaka’s pietistic concern with maintaining his purity is sometimes looked at askance, their positive values are also recognized. The bitterness of the last part of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) has no place in this book. Wu Chengen seems to encourage us to see how far short of ideal this world falls—and how that falling-short is inevitable, given its illusory nature. Still, it is the world we have to live in, and he allows his reader to see the joke in that.
