The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1

by Unknown

  If indigenous materials prove insufficient to establish with any certainty the origin of the monkey hero, does it imply that one must follow Hu Shi’s provocative conjectures and look for a prototype in alien literature?31 An affirmative answer to this question seems inviting, since the universally popular Hanumat adventures in the Rāmāyaṇa (hereafter R)32 story might have found their way into China through centuries of mercantile and religious traffic with India. Furthermore, the composition attributed to Vālmīki is known to have reached the Dunhuang texts in the form of Tibetan and Khotanese manuscripts. Subsequent research by both Chinese and European scholars, whom Dudbridge follows, has opined that early works of Chinese popular literature, whether in narrative or dramatic form, seem to contain no more than fragmentary and modified traces of the R epic in known Buddhist writings. Wu Xiaoling, who has canvassed a number of probable allusions to various episodes and incidents of R in extant Chinese Buddhist scriptures, has also argued for the improbability of the XYJ author having seen any of these.33 The often noted similarities between Hanumat and the Monkey of the narrative (courage and prowess in battle, extraordinary magic powers that include rapid aerial flights and transformations, the use of an iron rod as a weapon, and the tendency to attack their enemies by gaining entrance into their bellies) perhaps point to a “fund of shared motifs,”34 but Dudbridge’s cautious suggestion is that well-attested evidence of the intervening stages was lacking to establish influence or derivation.

  More recent scholarship, however, has steadily recognized that that “fund of shared motifs,” a rather large one, cannot be so easily ignored either. First, interesting textual and geographical details from other sources may indicate the convergence of Chinese and Indian motifs “in a body of monkey lore” surrounding the Hangzhou monastery, Lingyin Si , because they tell of resident monks who, like their non-Chinese counterparts, at one time raised monkeys. Monkeys reared in the Lingyin Monastery are said to have the surname Sun, using exactly the same pun on homophones of the graph sun (i.e., and ) as in the novel (chapter 1) with respect to the pilgrim’s eldest disciple, while monkeys brought up in India’s Spirit Vulture Mountain are said to have memorized and been able to recite the Triśaraṇa formula of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. The stories not only reinforce and perpetuate the striking theme of pious simians listening to scriptural exposition () favored and celebrated by Chinese literati and painters on account of the white gibbon’s “monogramous family life, his solitary habits,” and mournful cries that evoke and elicit weeping, but even more significantly, but they also specifically associate the Lingyin Mountain with the attributed abode of Buddha in India, the Spirit Garuḍa Peak (Sk. Gṛdhra-kūṭa).35 What is important about this group of legend and story is its exaltation of monkeys and the varying species such as gibbons, macaques, chimpanzees, and apes—along with other creatures like lions, peacocks, elephants, bears, bulls, and fishes—as beings capable of responding to Buddhist evangelistic speech and action by which the animals may even find enlightenment. This Chinese “religious” monkey fashioned in narrative, poetic, dramatic, and visual representation may be magically potent, mischievous, and even transgressive, but it need not be a figure so confirmed in evil that he is always to be extirpated. Most noteworthily, the sentient creature’s depicted action irrefutably constitutes one fundamental element of Indian religiosity encompassing both Hinduism and Buddhism, in which a huge variety of known animals and mythical beasts has been pressed into ritual service to the gods.36 Such a tendency might also have found demonstrable adaptation in the Daoist pantheon and the fiction thereof.37 By contrast, the dominant Chinese cultrual tradition’s simian lore may preserve some references to monkey-like creatures able to communicate in human speech, but there is no known account of a monkey attending a lecture on the Classic of Filial Piety or the Confucian Four Books.38 Indeed, the ritual theory articulated by state-sponsored Confucianism was perfectly clear on what distinguished human beings from animals: “A parrot can speak, but it does not cease being a bird; an ape can speak, but it does not cease being a beast. If now a human being does not observe ritual, is this person’s mind not beastly even if endowed with the ability of speech? For only animals do not observe ritual” (Liji , chapter 1 in SSJZS 1: 1231).

  The carved monkey figure of Quanzhou’s Buddhist temple, the different versions of the violent and rebellious ape in the Wuzhiqi myth and other dramatic accounts, the numerous textual representations of monkey fiends or demons that that are worshipped as malevolent cult dieties in need of religious exorcism,39 and the legend of the Lingyin Temple’s pious simians have lent weight to Dudbridge’s own previous suggestion for associating an early (by late Northern or early Southern Song) development of the XYJ story tradition with China’s southeastern coastal region, in parts belonging to the modern Fujian province.40 He cites as evidence a story from the Song collectanea of largely “tales of the anomalous (zhiguai xiaoshuo ),” the Yijianzhi by Hong Mai (1123–1202), that relates how a Monkey King , whose cultic worship inflicted fever and frenzy upon the populace, was brought to submission and also deliverance by the Buddhist elder Zongyan through his recitation in Sanskrit “the dhāranī of the All-Compassionate ().”41 Both Dudbridge and Isobe Akira’s subsequent discussion on additional textual sources of this tale and a couple of other similar stories seem to have emphasized the linkage to XYJ tradition primarily through the figure of a Monkey King.42 As I read the tale, however, what is most striking are the means and meaning of salvific pacification, since in the full-length novel, a recitation of dhāranī (spells, zhou ) is joined to the three fillets Buddha gave to Guanyin as weapons for compelling conversion (XYJ, chapter 8). For activating the three fillets, Buddha transmitted to Guanyin three fictionalized and punning spells (dhāranī, zhou) named “the Golden, the Constrictive, and the Prohibitive , , ,” and these fillets and spells would be used eventually by both Xuanzang and Guanyin on Sun Wukong (chapter 14), the Bear Monster (chapters 16–17), and the Red Boy (chapters 40–42) to induce submission to Buddhism.

  According to the novel, all three of these characters are deviant animalistic creatures who nonetheless find authentic religious deliverance. (The Red Boy of the novel had a Bull Monster for a father and a female demon for a mother. Both parents at the end of the episode also repented and went off to attain “the right fruit” through religious self-cultivation.) What is even more interesting is that the monkey figure’s taming by his fillet and the pain inflicted by the recited dhāranī, as all readers of the novel must remember, literally traverses almost the entire length of the narrative, from chapter 14 until Sun Wukong himself attains apotheosis in Buddhahood in chapter 100. This protracted allegory of arduous religious discipline leading to eventual enlightenment, I would argue, may well have been rhetorically anticipated, if not actually inspired, in part by the gātha (prosodically, a heptasyllabic quatrain) uttered by the Buddhist Zongyan to instruct his penitent monkey. The third poetic line of Hong Mai’s story—“You must believe your own mind is originally the Buddha ”—not only asserts at once a didactic thesis rehearsed continuously in the later Ming novel, but it also accords with a doctrinal emphasis much debated in Chan (Zen ) Buddhism (i.e., on the Buddha-nature as self or mind) and enthusiastically embraced by subsequent Quanzhen () Daoism that appeared around 1170 and drew considerably on Chan.43 Texts from both traditions, in turn, pervasively shape and color the language of the full-length novel. Hong Mai’s story resonates directly with the late Ming novel because a short tale of two score sentences and a long narrative of roughly 600,000 characters both purport to reveal through their plots why and how a Monkey King, already endowed with supernal powers, would still need to attain Buddhahood.

  In terms of chronology, Hong Mai’s line, in fact, directly echoes the first line of a poetic composition by Zhang Boduan (982/4?–1082), styled Ziyang Zhenren , who was the reputed founder of the southern lineage of the Quanzhen Order. Zhang’s poetic composition titled “Ode t
o ‘This Mind is Buddha’ ” begins with the line, “The Buddha is Mind and the Mind is Buddha ,”44 which the XYJ author/redactor significantly appropriated for a slightly modified ode that prefaces chapter 14 of the novel. That fictional episode detailing Sun Wukong’s final submission to Buddhism and his formal enlistment in the scripture pilgrimage just as significantly has been capped by the titular couplet: “Mind Monkey returns to the Right. / The Six Robbers vanish from sight , .” Because Zongyan’s instruction in Hong Mai’s story is directed to a monkey and not a human being, one need but recall the first two lines of the commentarial verse at the height of Sun Wukong’s brawl in Heaven (JW, chapter 7; XYJ, p. 70) to perceive the concordant meaning of mind and monkey threading the linguistic fabric of all three texts to render them pieces cut from the same doctrinal cloth: “An ape’s body of Dao weds the human mind. / Mind is a monkey—this meaning’s profound , .”

  Dudbridge’s monograph of 1970 praised Wu Xiaoling for showing “with admirable thoroughness that the Buddhist canon, which represents China’s greatest single import from India, carries no more than fragmentary and modified traces of the Rāmāyaṇa story and its leading figures, whether in rapid summaries or in passing allusions. These give no grounds for an assumption that the story was generally current in China.”45 Less than a decade after this verdict, Ji Xianlin, who would produce eventually another Chinese translation of the Indian epic, came to the exact opposite conclusion when he canvassed the same Buddhist canon, because he became convinced that the minutely episodic fragments of the epic pervading the sacred texts in Chinese were “egregiously abundant .”46 After all, much of the huge Buddhist canon, even if not yet enshrined in the magnitude of its final form, had already circulated in Chinese society for at least a thousand years by the time of the 1592 novel. Currency of the Indian epic might not have existed as a discrete textual entity, like the Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms of official historiography that prefigured its much later fictional counterpart, The Three Kingdoms , but one can hardly assert that bits and pieces of allusions to the epic were unknown to the Chinese public. Building on Ji’s specific labor on the Indian epic, no less than a massive body of evidence indicating the profusion and adaptation of Indian materials—motifs and themes in addition to specific linguistic echoes and textual citations—in traditional Chinese literary writings and sacred scriptures, Victor Mair’s 1989 essay might have settled a lengthy scholarly debate by demonstrating that such materials indeed pile up parallels between the characters of Hanumat and Sun Wukong.47 Even more compellingly and appropriately, his study suggests—to this reader at least—that the evolution of the novelistic monkey character was mediated through the lengthiest and most voluminous process of textual translation and cultural exchange the world has ever known and the impact that process had on Chinese writings and other cultural artifacts. Our current knowledge of both process and impact is widening but far from complete. Moreover, the particular relations between Hanumat and Sun Wukong were complicated by the transmission of a story and its summation or allusion in the diverse media of text or oral telling.48

  It is the merit of Mair’s essay to show in copious detail how references to the Indian epic had existed in Buddhist scriptures not just for Chinese readership but also for that of other lands. In the course of an expanding eastward journey, fragments, episodes, motifs, and themes of the Rāma story had found their way into a huge area of Central, Northeast, and Southeast Asia, including Tocharistan, Khotan, Tibet, Southeast Asia, and Japan, apart from China. To mention just a few examples, the forty-sixth story in the Liudu ji jing , speciously named “Jātaka of an Unnamed King” (Anāmaka-rāja-jātaka), is actually a Chinese translation of the Ṣaṭ-pārāmitā-saṃgraha-sūtra [?] by one Seng Hui in as early as 251.49 Moreover, it paraphrases the entire epic story in Chinese: “we have Rāma’s exile, Sītā’s abduction by Rāvaṇa, the duel of Rāvaṇa with Jaṭāyus, the battle between Sugrīva and Vālin, the construction of a bridge to Laṅkā, Hanumat’s curing of the fallen soldiers, Hanumat’s rescue of Sītā, and a variant of Sītā’s ordeal by fire (agni-parīṣā).”50 Complementing this text is the Shi shewang yuan (Tale of Causal Origins Concerning King Ten Luxuries), translated in 472 by Kiṃkārya in collaboration with the Chinese cleric Tanyao .51 It again presents numerous crucial incidents and episodes of the Indian epic. Finally, the historical Xuanzang himself could not have been ignorant of the poem, because his own “rendition of the Mahāvibhāṣā commentary ” specifically considers the long epic’s 12,000 ślokas as all having been designed to elucidate the twin themes of Rāvaṇa’s abduction of Princess Sītā and her rescue by Rāma.52

  When the novel and the epic are juxtaposed, Journey (chapters 68–71) and Rāmāyaṇa contain astonishing and sustained parallels in plot construction and description of characters. The comparable features include the anguish caused by the abducted loss of a spouse (Rāma’s grief for Sītā; the King of the Scarlet-Purple Kingdom for his queen consort); the misery of the female prisoners as depicted in facial dejection, unkempt and dirty clothing, disheveled hairdo, absence of make-up, jewelry, and ornaments, and constant weeping (XYJ chapter 70, vs. R V. 13: 18–33); and devising tokens of recognition (rings and bracelets) by the different monkey figures to establish the kidnapped female’s identity. When the novel’s Bodhisattva Guanyin providentially explains the separation and reunion of the royal couple, she discloses the human king’s one past offense while hunting when his arrow accidentally wounded the Bodhisattva Great King Peacock. As another study astutely observes, “the motif of the hunter who becomes separated from someone he loves as a result of karmic retribution runs rampant through Indian literature,” and part of the XYJ story here thus recalls not just the Rāmāyaṇa but also similar notions of “desire, yearning, and separation” surfacing from the very beginning of the even longer epic Mahābhārata.53

  We may perhaps never be able to resolve the question of Sun Wukong’s origin to every reader’s satisfaction, but every reader with a vested interest in this topic seems also all too eager in choosing far-fetched details that would intimate heroic “personality (xingge )” and ferocious “form or appearance (xingxiang )” to fund, allegedly, the progressive literary development of Monkey’s depiction or any random aspect associated with the evolving story of Xuanzang’s pilgrimage. These details favored by sundry Chinese (e.g., Zheng Mingli) and Japanese (e.g., Uchida Michio, Isobe Akira, Nakano Miyoko) scholars on the ape are usually preserved in selected texts of the Buddhist canon and, as such, are no more or less “historical” than the textualized representation of a Fujian cult figure in story or ethnography. In any study of literary derivation or influence, even the existence of a cult for a particular mythical figure—whether Odysseus or Sun Wukong—cannot take priority over linguistic and textual comparison. Nor can such study ignore how the eventual composition appropriated the source materials—whether in discernible chunks or minute fragments, whether in strict fidelity to borrowed language or with unfettered freedom and creativity in its modification. We shall see, as we move through this introduction, that one cannot fully understand the full-length XYJ without appreciating its Indian and Buddhist as well as its native roots.

  If the genealogy of Sun Wukong remains controversial, we have at least three other texts of major import between the Kōzanji version and the hundred-chapter narrative of the sixteenth century, texts which undoubtedly contributed to the formation of the latter. First, there is a passage of a little less than 1,100 characters which is preserved in the scant surviving remnants of the Yongle dadian (the encyclopedic collection compiled in 1403–08 under commission of the Ming emperor Chengzu ). This passage constitutes a remarkable parallel to portions of chapter 9 in the hundred-chapter narrative (chapter 10 in the 1592 XYJ).54 Though the episodes concerning Tripitaka’s genealogy and public debut receive much fuller treatment in the later work, the essential sequences (i.e., the conversations between a fisherman named Zhang Shao and a woodcutter named Li Ding, th
e transgressions of the Dragon King and his conviction by the fortune-teller Yuan Shoucheng, and the dream execution of the dragon by the prime minister Wei Zheng [580–643] in the midst of a chess game with the emperor Taizong) and certain sentences and phrases (e.g., the Dragon King’s address to the emperor: “Your majesty is the true dragon, whereas I am only a false dragon”) are nearly identical in both accounts. What is of greater interest here is that the Yongle dadian extract is listed under an old source named Xiyouji, which may well have existed as a kind of Urtext for all the dramatic and narrative works that are to follow. This text, unfortunately, is now lost, and the lack of information on authorship, texts, and publisher prohibits any conclusion other than the existence of a document or documents by such a name two centuries before the circulation of the full-length novel.

  Such a conclusion may certainly find further support in the Pak t’ongsa ŏnhae (in Chinese, the Pu tongshi yanjie ), a Korean reader in colloquial Chinese first printed probably some time in the mid-fifteenth century, though the surviving version now preserved in the Kyu-chang-kak collection of the Seoul University library has a preface which dates from 1677. This manual contains an account of Tripitaka’s experience in the Chechi Guo (the Cart-Slow Kingdom of chapters 44–46 in the novel), and, more significantly, “the picture of ordinary people going out to buy popular stories in a book [which] confirms that a Xiyouji was among those available.”55 There are, moreover, a number of references to mythic regions and to various demons and gods (including Zhu Bajie [translated in the present edition as Zhu Eight Rules], appointed Janitor of the Altars at the end of the journey) which find echoes in subsequent dramatic and narrative accounts.56 There is too little external evidence to allow reconstructing a lost text, but internal analysis of this document, as Dudbridge aptly observes, presents “evidence as a trend . . . that the Xiyouji story, now well known in published form, was progressively assuming an accepted and less variable form.”57