The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1

by Unknown

  Xiyouji for these several centuries has been ruined by countless Daoists, monks, and Confucians. The Daoists said, this book is a volume of wonderous formulas for the golden elixir. The monks said, this book is about the method of mind cultivation in the Gate of Chan. The Confucians said, this book is one on the principles of rectifying the mind and rendering sincere the will. These interpretations are the great adversaries of Xiyouji.116

  How influential this view of Hu has been may be seen in the echoing remarks of Lu Xun, another giant of early modern Chinese letters:

  Though its author was a student of Confucius, this book actually arose from playfulness and not from discussion of Dao. That is why only platitudes like the mutual birth and conquest cycles of the Five Phases are seen occasionally in the entire book, which is especially not learned in Buddhism.117

  The influence of Hu is also seen in countless other writers and commentators. Perhaps the extreme position along this line is represented by the verdict of Tanaka Kenji and Arai Ken, who have asserted that, unlike other traditional tales of the supernatural in China, this late Ming narrative neither is accompanied by the shadow of religion and superstition nor emphasizes the karmic principle of reward and retribution. Rather, the world of Xiyouji manifests what Miki Katsumi has said of it in his Saiyūki Oboegaki: “human liberation from mystery and progress from the medieval world to the spirit of modernity.”118

  Not all modern students of this work, however, subscribe to such an astonishing view of its nature. While fully acknowledging the wealth of comedy and satire in the novel, C.T. Hsia pointedly challenged Hu’s judgment when he observed that “the phrase ‘profound nonsense’ . . . concedes the necessity for philosophical or allegorical interpretation.”119 Since the time of this assertion, many scholars around the globe have not merely conceded such necessity, but they have also probed and mined deeply the vast supply of textual sources funding and fertilizing the composition of the hundred-chapter narrative. Although there is no consensus on whether the entire story represents a fully developed and self-consistent allegory (similar to, say, Dante’s Commedia or Spenser’s Faerie Queene), Chinese, Japanese, European, and American academicians have exerted a noteworthy, even if not concerted, effort to reverse the critical tendencies dominant in the early republican period. My intention here is only to exploit this massive scholarship to highlight what requires further investigation if we are to appreciate the novel as a work of full-blown fiction.120 These features, linguistically and thematically interrelated, concern (1) the monk and the transformed depiction of both pilgrim and pilgrimage, (2) the monkey and his significance in the journey, and (3) the fiction of religious allegory.

  The Monk and the Transformed Depiction of Both Pilgrim and Pilgrimage

  Part I of this introduction pointed out that the historical Xuanzang’s motivation to undertake his protracted and precarious journey to fetch scriptures from India was entirely a matter of personal faith. A young religious zealot, he defied the law of the state against going abroad. The Account of Conduct (), composed by his disciple Mingxiang probably in 664 CE and thus the earliest biography of the priest serving as official obituary, relates the incident of a nameless barbarian (hu ) hired to assist the pilgrim slip past undetected the five signal-fire ramparts strung out beyond the Jade Gate Pass ().

  In the middle of the night [while they were resting by a riverbank], the barbarian arose and walked toward the Master of the Law with a drawn blade, intent on killing him. Whereupon the Master of the Law rose up and began immediately to recite the name of Buddha and a sūtra. The barbarian sat down, only to stand up once more after a little while, saying to the priest: “According to the Law of the State (), it is a most serious crime to go to a foreign state for personal reasons (, ). When you pass through the road beneath those five signal fires, you will be caught for certain. Wherever you are arrested, you will be a dead man ()! Since your disciple still has family obligations, how could I take this on myself? Imperial law cannot be breached. Allow me to go back with the Master.”

  The Master of the Law replied, “Xuanzang can only die facing the West, but I vow I shall not return East and live. If my patron cannot do this, he is free to turn back. Let Xuanzang proceed by himself.”121

  For a priest “vowing to tour the region of the West so as to inquire about the perplexities [of his faith] . . . . ” (FSZ 1 in SZZSHB, p. 7), the act of embarking on his journey was indisputably treasonous and illegal. For him as a Tang subject and an ethnic Han to be reminded by a “barbarian” of both the nature and risk of his illicit action also conveyed immense irony, but this part of the historical record clearly exerted no impact on the long and complex process of fictionalization transforming monk Xuanzang’s character and the meaning of his pilgrimage. Nowhere is this transformation more apparent than at the very beginning of a different narrative of the story begun in the Song poetic tale. When the account proceeds after the lost chapter 1 segment, it starts with the monkey figure’s appearance as a “white-robed scholar” asking the human pilgrim whether he was going to the Western Heaven to acquire scriptures. The monk’s reply betokens a sudden and potent emergence of fiction with these words: “Your humble monk has received this imperial commission: because the living multitudes in the Land of the East have not yet possessed the Buddhist religion, I thus must acquire scriptures , , .” This assertion about his appointed task is repeated with expanded words in chapter 15 when he was queried by Buddhist monks in India about his journey: “I received from the Tang emperor a decreed commission [] because the living multitudes in the Land of the East have not possessed the Buddhist religion. Thus my special reason for rushing to your country to beg for the Great Vehicle.”122 The addition of a single adjective (decreed) to the graph for command or commission (chi) has the unmistakable force of documentary authorization.

  Modern scholars have recognized this episode’s importance mainly because it initiates the narrative association of the fictive Xuanzang with the monkey acolyte (hou xingzhe) that, over the next several centuries, would reach its climactic figure towering over the hundred-chapter novel of 1592. By contrast, virtually no study has paid attention to the human pilgrim’s brief remark and its implications in which the seeds of an immense fiction are sown by two patently false claims: that the Buddhist religion has yet to reach China at the time of the pilgrimage and that his journey is undertaken by imperial authorization. As far as I know, neither the literary and material antecedents of the novel nor the scholarship devoted to their study have offered any plausible explanation for the first lie. That erroneous assertion about Buddhism’s entry into China might have been a popular invention of either ignorance or fantasy, caused perhaps by the desire to inflate Xuanzang’s stature further by eliding his scripture acquisition with the introduction of the religion into the country. Concerning the second claim by the Tang Monk in the poetic tale, there are many details studding the long, formative history of the XYJ fiction to emphasize that the monk’s relationship with the emperor and his court before leaving China is an indispensable feature. Noting some of these details may help us understand better the story finalized in the 1592 version.

  As I pointed out in the beginning of this introduction, Chen Xuanzang was a native of central western China. Apart from his nearly seventeen years abroad, he never left that region. In the account of the legendary Xuanzang evolving through dramatic, novelistic, and possibly religious texts (e.g., the various baojuan and shanshu appearing in the Ming), however, we encounter a protagonist of different pedigree and situated in a vastly different geographical setting. This account tells of a paternal lineage originating from Haizhou , in Hongnong county . It relocates Xuangzang and his family all the way to modern Jiangsu province.123 It ties the first eighteen years of Xuanzang’s life and its vicissitudes to the coastal region of southeastern China, as told by the twenty-four scene drama and the controversial chapter 9 absent from the 1592 edition. Xuanzang, the infant abandoned by his mother on a river, was re
scued and reared by a Buddhist abbot of Gold Mountain ,124 who eventually helped the former avenge parental wrongs. As told also in the drama with the same name of XYJ, Buddhist “providence” personified in the goddess Guanyin crucially shapes events so that they lead eventually to the Tang emperor’s selecting Xuanzang as the scripture-seeker.125 All versions of the hundred-chapter XYJ displace the intensely personal zeal of a plebian priest by the new motivations undergirding his enormous enterprise: Buddha’s compassionate wisdom in offering scriptures as a salvific gift to the unenlightened, sinful Chinese in the Land of the East counterpoints the fictive pilgrim’s religious devotion and his loyalty to the emperor. Perhaps building from Guanyin’s speech in the drama, the all-important chapter 8 of the novel locates the true and foundational motivation for the scripture enterprise squarely in Buddha’s prescient and transcendent wisdom to which Guanyin, the Tang emperor, the human candidate for the pilgrimage, and his four disciples obediently responded.

  In the controversial chapter 9 of the novel, the story becomes one about the social status and eminence of Xuanzang’s immediate family—father as incomparable scholar who took first honors (or zhuangyuan) in the civil service examination and was rewarded by marriage to a prime minister’s daughter—and how that connection helped the orphaned priest avenge his parents and meet eventually the emperor who would choose him as the scripture pilgrim. Even in the 1592 Shidetang edition which omits this chapter, a long biographical poem (XYJ, p. 131; JW 1: 275) and the prose narration in chapter 12 display the following stable ingredients: the pilgrim’s prenatal identity as the Buddha’s disciple, the Elder Gold Cicada; his exile to the human world for inattentiveness during a lecture by Buddha; his father’s success and marriage to the high minister Yin Kaishan’s daughter; the father’s subsequent murder by a pirate; Xuanzang’s ordeal at birth on a river leading to his nickname, Child River Float, and his rescue by the Abbot of Gold Mountain Monastery; his reunion with his mother and paternal grandmother; his success in avenging his father; his father’s revivification; and the emperor’s eventual selection of Xuanzang as the scripture pilgrim. Taken as a whole, they form the consistent elements of a story complex exploiting certain features of the Jātaka tales (: e.g., stories on prior and present incarnations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas) and of morality books (e.g., Xuanzang’s restoring his grandmother’s eyesight by saliva and tongue-licking, an example of “moving Heaven by filial feelings ”). In this regard, whether the problematic chapter 9 is authentic or not is a moot question, because all the Ming and Qing full-length editions of the novel known to us, with or without this chapter, include all of these fictional details and make them germane to the pilgrim’s person and experience.

  The question that a critical reader at this point must raise is why: why must the novel make central use of such a popular Xuanzong story, so at odds with known history? If for millennia historiography ruled as “the supreme narrative model in [premodern] China” to which all other literary genres respect and emulate,126 why does the hundred-chapter XYJ fashion its human protagonist in a manner that would surely try—as it has, indeed, down to the present day—the patience of his historically aware readers? It is too easy to answer that ingredients gathered from Jātaka tales and morality books provided more entertainment for readers. As I interpret the story, a cardinally important element that hitherto has been ignored or dismissed is that the fiction links the human pilgrim and the Tang court even before the pilgrimage. That linkage—most false but also most true—has profound implications for shaping the meaning of both the human pilgrim’s character and his mission.

  The pilgrim’s father and his marital family, as the novelistic adaptation of the legend makes clear, had been well known to Tang Taizong even before disaster struck, and so the adult Xuanzang’s attempt at vengeance eighteen years later received ready assistance from the court. Ostensibly a device for elevating the social status of the pilgrim, such thematic details are even more plausible markers of karmic affinity. Intent on keeping his promise to hold a Grand Mass of Land Water after his death and tour of the Underworld, the emperor Taizong, when presented with Xuanzang’s suggested candidacy, “thought silently for a long time and said, ‘Can Xuanzang be the son of Grand Secretary Chen Guangrui?’” (XYJ, p. 132; JW 1: 276). The ruler’s recognition and Guanyin’s epiphany immediately following thus provide the foundation of the long novel: this momentous enterprise of seeking scriptures could not have been due merely to the piety of a little-known individual, let alone the lawless zeal of a defiant cleric. Its transcendent origin is the mind of the Buddhist Patriarch himself, but the immense journey requires the equal partnership of a supreme human ruler on earth.

  Such an emphasis, deriving from the Song poetic tale’s two short allusions to the Tang Monk’s “imperial mission,” has made it impossible—and perhaps even irrelevant—to reconcile known historical chronology of Xuanzang with the legend’s chronotope, the fictive time scheme required by the Chen Guangrui story.127 Despite that textual contradiction, no reader of the full-length novel can miss how deeply in Xuanzang’s consciousness is imprinted the magnitude of the imperial favor and charge bestowed on him. In sharp contrast to the historical figure’s initial defiance of the ban on travel, the fictive priest—promoted to be the emperor’s bond-brother in return for his willingness to seek the scriptures—said to the ruler: “Your Majesty, what ability and what virtue does your poor monk possess that he should merit such affection from your Heavenly Grace? I shall not spare myself in this journey, but I shall proceed with all diligence until I reach the Western Heaven. If I did not attain my goal or the true scriptures, I would not dare return to our land even if I were to die. May I fall into eternal perdition in Hell” (JW 1: 290).

  Whereas the historical pilgrim, upon his successful return to China with the scriptures, felt compelled to seek imperial pardon for “braving to transgress the authoritative statutes and departing for India on one’s own authority” through both written memorial and direct oral petition (FSZ 6), the fictive priest would be welcomed by a faithful ruler, who had a Scripture-Anticipation Tower () built to await his envoy for eleven more years (chapter 100). This portrait of the pilgrimage’s imperial sponsorship, intervention (most notably in the travel rescript bearing the imperial seal administered by the emperor himself),128 and reception helps explain why the fictive priest considered his religious mission to be his obligation to his lord and state. The mission’s success fulfilled equally his vows to Buddha and to a human emperor. At the beginning of chapter 13, the lead-in poem thus launches the priest’s journey: “The rich Tang ruler issued a decree / Deputing Xuanzang to seek the source of Zen / .”

  The fact that the fictive pilgrim was sent on his way by the highest human authority also changes fundamentally Xuanzang’s identity and its mode of disclosure. In sharp contrast to the historical figure who, deciding to defy the court’s proscription to travel to the western frontier, “dared not show himself in public but rested during the day and journeyed only at night , ” (FSZ 1, in SZZSHB, p. 9), the novelistic Xuanzang did not hesitate to tell the first stranger he met that he was an imperial envoy sent by the Tang emperor to seek scriptures from Buddha in the Western Heaven (XYJ, chapter 13, p. 147; JW 1: 299). Throughout the priest’s journey, the bold and unwavering announcement of this august mission by both master and disciples became a refrain to every conceivable audience—divine, demonic, or human—much as the imperial travel rescript authorizing his undertaking would be signed and stamped with royal seals of all the states and kingdoms the pilgrims visited as proof of their gaining permitted passage (chapter 100). The “Shengjiao xu (Preface to the Holy Religion)” bestowed by the historical Taizong on the repatriated Xuanzang, transcribed nearly verbatim in chapter 100 of the novel, declared unambiguously that the dangerous journey was the monk’s solitary expedition (, ). In that ex post facto encomium bequeathed to a cleric newly pardoned for a seventeen-year old crime against the state,129 not even the emperor could c
laim credit for authorizing or assisting the project in any manner. On the other hand, the invented rescript, in poignant irony, would not allow the readers ever to forget that imperial charge and enablement were as much needed as the assistance of the gods.

  Throughout the novel’s lengthy course, there are quite a few occasions on which Xuanzang, expressing undying loyalism to his emperor, frets about his inability to fulfill the decreed wish of his human lord as much as the dreaded failure to reach and see Buddha. Fearing that an illness might prove fatal during the episode of the Sea-Pacifying Monastery in chapter 81, a tearful Tripitaka would write a poem that he wants Monkey to take back to the Tang court, to inform his Sage Lord of his precarious health and request another pilgrim be sent to take his place. Captured by a leopard monster in chapter 85, Tripitaka explains to a fellow prisoner that “If I lose my life here, would that not have dashed the expectation of the emperor and the high hopes of his ministers? , , ?” When told by his interlocutor, a stereotypical woodcutter who is the sole supporter of an old widowed mother (cf. the one who spoke to Monkey in chapter 1), the priest breaks into loud wailing, crying:

  How pitiful! How pitiful!

  If mountain rustics still long for their kin,

  This poor monk’s been trained to chant sūtras in vain.

  To serve the ruler or to serve one’s parents follows the same principle: you live by the kindness of your parents, as I do by the kindness of my ruler , / . , : , (XYJ, p. 975).

  I should remind the novel’s readers that there was no justification, and no possibility, for the historical Xuanzang to utter words such as these on his secret pilgrimage to India, or even after his return to his native land and being favored with imperial patronage for the rest of his life. When the historical Tang emperor bid the honored priest accept an imperial appointment soon after his homecoming, the cleric declined with forthright boldness: “Xuanzang during his youth had already entered the Gate of the Black Robes and received in submission the Way of Buddha. The ultimate principle of mystery is what I practice, and I have not heeded [full force of “hearing” in Buddhist rhetoric] the Confucian religion , , , ” (FSZ 6, in SZZSHB, p. 133). Even as the rhetoric of courtly propriety, this statement reported in historiography directly contradicts the emotional outburst in the novelistic episode cited earlier.