by Unknown
‘Taming the Horse of the Mind’, an allegory of spiritual discipline, has a number of avatars in Chinese religious culture. An example in the Daozang is found in the ‘Three Essentials for the Cultivation of the Perfection According to the Superior Vehicle’ by Gao Daokuan (1195–1277), a Quanzhen master in the lineage of the twelfth-century patriarch Ma Danyang. . . . [It] likens the disciplining of the mind (xin) and of human nature (xing) to the training of a horse. The allegory was current in Quanzhen Daoism and constituted a variant of the Training of the Buffalo in Chan Buddhism and of the Bridling of the Horse of the will (yima), the latter popularised in the novel Journey to the West. In Quanzhen-inspired Yuan poetic drama (zaju), the horse appears, in the manner of the Inner Alchemical metaphors . . . , as an anatomical personification of the Daoist Yellow Court (huangting), i.e. the central organ of the heart or mind (xin).142
“Popularised” in our novel, indeed, but Professor Verellen could have added the other animal, monkey, to the horse. In another Yuan play authored by Fan Zi’an , “Chen Jiqing wushang zhuyezhou (Chen Jiqing boarded by mistake the bamboo-leaf boat),” the character Lü Dongbin sings the following lines:
I don’t pick any strange seedlings or exotic herbs,
Nor do I wear treasured script and numinous talisman.
I only need to nurse this spirit till it’s pure like water,
To smelt my bone marrow till it’s like cheese,
All day long tying up tight the Monkey of the Mind and the Horse of the Will to a post , / , / , / , / .143
The aria for the famous transcendent here, like the collected lyrics attributed to the “historical” Lü in QSC 5: 3858–60, is shifting the emphasis of alchemical self-cultivation by external aids to internal discipline of body and mind.
A Chan- or Quanzhen-inspired novel like XYJ was not written necessarily as a work of religious proselytism. Some contemporary Chinese scholars argued that it is, but whether we should accept this thesis without qualification is another matter. Before we end this section on the Monkey, I want to discuss other textual examples of how religious idioms feed and facilitate fictive representation, a topic that, for me, is far more interesting and important. Because both Chan and Quanzhen discourses have focused on the difficult paradox of at once consulting and disregarding the power of xin, the heart-and-mind generating the nearly irresistible drives of emotion and intellect, the novel’s depiction of Sun Wukong’s character, on more than one occasion, is similarly double-sided. Not simply a demotic hero and instinctual political rebel, as many Chinese critics have tended to read him, Sun personifies a crucial part of the human being essential for the pilgrimage’s success, but also demanding constant restraint.
When the internal contradiction of the Mind/Heart’s cultivation seems to reach an insoluble aporia, because mindlessness and mindfulness are both necessary and dispensable, the faculty of Mind/Heart can literally split into two identical entities of two minds or double-mindedness (erxin, ) that, according to the brilliant allegory of chapters 56, 57, and 58, only Buddha’s transcendent wisdom can overcome.144 In this exciting and hilarious episode when Sun Wukong battled his own inseparable mirror image throughout the cosmos till they reached the Western Heaven, Buddha’s words to calm a startled assembly attending the Patriarch’s lecture expose the nature of the avatars: “You are all of one mind, but take a look at Two Minds (erxin) in conflict arriving here” (XYJ, chapter 58, p. 672). The swift and violent slaying of the Sixth-Ear Macaque named for Monkey’s double thus enacts literally two lines of a commentarial poem in the same chapter 58, preceding even Buddha’s clarification (XYJ, p. 671): “If one has two minds, disasters he’ll breed / . . . The Gate of Chan must learn the No Mind Spell / . . . . .”145
An earlier episode (chapter 17) gives another brilliant twist of narration to the truth of this formula, when Tripitaka’s cassock, a gift of Buddha through the Tang emperor, was stolen by a bear monster. Sun Wukong asks the Bodhisattva Guanyin, who came to the pilgrims’ assistance, to change into the form of the monster to gain access to the real one, whom they both plan to attack.
Immediately the Bodhisattva exercised her great mercy and boundless power. With her infinite capacity for transformation, her mind moved in perfect accord with her will, and her will with her body: in one blurry instant, she changed into the form of the immortal Lingxuzi [one of the monsters]. . . . When Pilgrim saw the transformation, he cried, “Marvelous, Marvelous! Is the monster the Bodhisattva, or is the Bodhisattva the monster?” The Bodhisattva smiled and said, “Wukong, the Bodhisattva and the monster, they both exist in a single thought (yinian ). Considered in terms of their origin, they are all nothing [or nonexistent] (, ).” (XYJ, chapter 17, p. 201; JW 1: p. 000)
That a Bodhisattva Guanyin and a monster are progeny of one and the same thought counters Tripitaka’s paraphrase of a cardinal Buddhist doctrine: “when the mind is active [xinsheng , literally, when the mind is born or grows], all kinds of māra [i.e., demons or demonic barriers] come into existence; when the mind is extinguished, all kinds of māra will be extinguished” (XYJ, chapter 13, p. 143; see also note 137). The active mind (xinsheng, xindong) is thus when the heart/mind is in motion or movement, a state that both Buddhists and Daoists would dearly like to arrest or avoid. Even those outside such religious traditions, Chinese from the ancient Mencius to the modern Chairman Mao Zedong, with countless elites and commoners throughout history, have cherished and sought the unmoved mind (budongxin ).146 The fiction of Guanyin’s transformation in chapter 17, however, points to an ironic reversal because it depicts presumably the good that “one thought” can generate: by moving her mind and her will, says the novel, the Bodhisattva as monster will eventually bring the monster to submit. The XYJ author’s utilization of the potent philosophical religion of mind or mentalism shared by Chan and Quanzhen lineages is thus not merely repetitive but also subtly faceted. Even the powerful and apparently real figure of the Bull Monster King narratively exists—like the macaque of Monkey’s double—only as another Sun Wukong, perhaps even as a repressed other. Unexpectedly, Monkey himself declaims this striking equation (chapter 61): “Bull King was in fact from Mind Monkey changed. / Now’s the best time for us to reach the source , ” (JW 3: 174; XYJ, p. 701). Since certain Buddhist doctrines assert that the enlightened mind renders as all phenomena (zhong-zhong fa , the Dharma as myriad things that have entity and bear their own attributes) undifferentiable and thus unreal, we can argue that, conversely, the linguistic proliferation of such vivid unreality as realistic phenomena defines this novel’s incomparable achievement in fiction. In the final analysis, is it not the creative writer’s mind in motion that ushers into existence the myriad demons and gods—and much else—in this fiction? Every being inhabiting the novelistic universe may be subject to the ideal of the unmoved mind so loudly proclaimed throughout, but the artist who has created this universe cannot do so without his or her mind’s arousal, motion, and growth. Guanyin’s instruction to Monkey may have answered her interlocutor’s immediate query with perfect doctrinal correctness, but it sounds to me like a most perceptive definition of fiction as well: “Considered in terms of their origin, they are all nothing.”
The Fiction of Religious Allegory
The biographical account of Xuanzang’s pilgrimage does not record that he was accompanied from beginning to end by disciples, companions, or even a beast of burden. The poetic tale of the Song that started the Tripitaka legend mentions repeatedly that the pilgrim’s entourage had seven persons, including the converted monkey acolyte. For the full-length novel of 1592, the total number of the pilgrims is perhaps significantly fixed at five, with the human master attended by four disciples, one of which is a dragon-horse. This numerical structure of the pilgrims may betoken a design of multiple signification.
First, the enterprise of scripture-seeking by means of a protracted and perilous journey has become a corporate endeavor, not simply the triumphant accomplishment of one courageous and long-suffering
zealot. Not only is the fictional Tripitaka in constant need of his disciples, but the author also just as regularly alters and diminishes his human protagonist to indicate why he needs them. Readers past and present have protested the foolishness, the cowardice, the obtuseness, and a host of other weaknesses bedeviling this Tripitaka’s character, but such a delineation is necessary if the disciples’ presence is not to be superfluous. Throughout the novel, Tripitaka persists in his own delusions and illusions, appositely winning the epithet bestowed on him by both Sun Wukong and the narrator that he is of “fleshly eyes and mortal stock .”
When, in chapter 22, the pilgrims are stranded on the eastern shore of the Flowing-Sand River, Wukong and Wuneng debate how to help Tripitaka across the river.
“You have no idea,” says Pilgrim, who seldom resists boasting a little of his own ability, “about the capacity of my cloud somersault, which with one leap can cover a hundred and eight thousand miles. . . .” “Elder Brother,” says Eight Rules, “if it’s so easy, all you need to do is to carry Master on your back: nod your head, stretch your waist, and jump across. . . .” To which Pilgrim, after some reflection, responds: “But it is required of Master to go through all these strange territories before he finds deliverance from the sea of sorrows; hence even one step turns out to be difficult.” (JW 1: 427–28)
These remarks by the two disciples point up the fundamental truth concerning Tripitaka’s pilgrimage: for all the supernatural forces coming to aid or harm him, Tripitaka must journey to the West as a human mortal. Just as he is conditioned by his physical limitations, and the thousand hills and ten thousand waters cannot be circumvented, so he is also subject to intellectual errors, emotional delusions, and moral shortcomings. His dependence on his followers, especially Sun Wukong, is therefore utterly necessary.
Second, what renders all three disciples of the mortal monk so powerful, however, is the fact that each of them is able to bring something unusual to assist the human master. The first sign of potency, appositely, seems to be an external instrument, appearing as the magic weapons that each of them possesses, which, in the course of the narrative, become extensions of their characters. The device is also manifestly literary, because the famous warriors of Chinese history and fiction are nearly always identified by some peculiar weapons of their own. Guan Yu (160–219) has his Scimitar of the Green Dragon and Crescent Moon and Lü Bu (d. 198) has his Halberd of Square Sky in The Three Kingdoms; “Black Cyclone” Li Kui has his pair of battle-axes in the Outlaws of the Marshes. The list of fighters with their particular weapons, magical or otherwise, is almost endless in the Investiture of the Gods. Few such instruments of war, however, receive the kind of eulogistic and meticulous treatment accorded the rod of Pilgrim, the muckrake of Eight Rules, and the priestly staff of Sha Monk in The Journey to the West. Prior to their battle in chapter 19, when Pilgrim asked Eight Rules whether his rake is used “to plough the fields or plant vegetables for the Gao family [his secular in-laws],” his reply, again in the form of a long pailü poem, draws heavily on mythological allusions to emphasize the celestial splendor of his weapon. “Just listen to my recital!” he says: “This is divine ice steel greatly refined, / Polished so highly that it glows and shines” [see p. 382]. A little later, in chapter 22, when Sha Wujing is in turn questioned by Eight Rules about his weapon, this is part of his reply: “It’s called the treasure staff good for crushing fiends, / Forever placed in Divine Mists to rout the ogres” [see p. 428].
Needless to say, the iron rod of Wukong himself, the most famous weapon in the entire narrative, is also the mightiest of all; its origin is traced supposedly to its first use by the legendary King Yu, the conqueror of the Flood in China. This piece of iron, tipped with gold at both ends, is employed by Yu to fix the depths of the rivers and the oceans (chapters 3 and 88), after which it is stored in the deepest part of the Eastern Ocean until Monkey acquires it. On a few occasions, Wukong’s rod is referred to as peculiarly fitting for his apish personality, perhaps a sardonic reference to the monkeys playing with sticks or poles in vaudeville shows in traditional China,147 much as the Pig’s muckrake humorously reminds us of his owner’s swinish nature and farming talents. But Monkey’s rod throughout the narrative is also that indispensable instrument by which he overcomes the demons and ogres crowding the pilgrims’s journey. As he says in the panegyric on his weapon in chapter 88: “It can everywhere the Tiger tame and the Dragon subdue; / It can everyplace the monster exorcise and the demon smelt.” Since the phrases, “tame the Tiger and subdue the Dragon,” “exorcise the monster and smelt the demon,” can refer, metaphorically, to the alchemical action within the body as well,148 the magic rod becomes also an implement of the self-cultivation practiced by its master. For this reason, when it is the turn of the three disciples of Tripitaka to make disciples themselves in chapter 88, they teach martial arts (wuyi ) to the three human princes of the Jade-Flower Kingdom. The weapons they instruct them to use are identical to those of the pilgrims, but only after the princes’ mortal frames have been transformed by the immortal breath of Sun Wukong can they carry a rod, a rake, and a staff of immense weight, but still less heavy than the original weapons. Even more significantly, their linkage to Daoism is already made in the novel, for when the weapons of the pilgrims are stolen, the closing poetic commentary in chapter 88 declares: “Dao can’t be left for a moment; / What can be left is not the Dao. / When weapons divine are stolen, / The seekers have labored in vain.” Because the poem’s first two lines quote verbatim the opening sentences of the Doctrine of the Mean, one of the four canonical texts of classical Confucianism now appropriated by another tradition, divine weapons (shenbing) have become metaphors for the cultivation of Dao, not the Confucian kind but the one sought and practiced vigilantly by the Daoist seekers .
The three disciples’ weapons symbolizing their success in the first stage of their quest for immortality serve to mark them as adepts in the mysteries of longevity. Witness the lengthy pailü poems spoken by Zhu Wuneng in chapter 19 and by Sha Wujing in chapter 22. What these poems describe is the process of internal alchemy that texts of the Daoist Canon have discussed with endless variations, and which contemporary scholars have studied increasingly.149 The process offers to the practititoner, among other things, longevity, health, magical powers, and ascent to Heaven in broad daylight at its successful completion. That which Zhu Wuneng has been able to attain, despite his early indolence and sloth, is also the achievement of both Wukong and Sha Wujing, who are, by their own testimonies (cf. XYJ, chapter 17, pp. 192–93; chapter 52, pp. 600–601; chapter 63, p. 721; chapter 70, pp. 795–96; chapter 71, pp. 811–12; chapter 86, p. 980; chapter 94, pp. 1060–61, for Wukong; chapter 22, pp. 247–48, and chapter 94, p. 1061, for Wujing) and by evidence in the narrative, more earnest in the practice of religion. They thus qualify as the human monk’s guardians on a physical journey fraught with peril.
Third, the religious attainment of the disciples also highlights their paradoxical status in the story. Monkey, as we recall, an animal literally created by Heaven and Earth, learned part of the secrets of Daoist immortality. Sha Monk’s antecedent might have ultimately derived from the historical Xuanzang’s biographical account of his experience at the River of Flowing Sand. The author of the Song poetic tale (in a fragment of section 8) modified and amalgamated it with the story of the Deep-Sand God .150 According to Sha’s own poetic autobiography recited in chapter 22, he was born a human, but his determination to “learn of the Dao ” through cultivation brought success and celestial appointment in the Daoist pantheon as the Curtain-Raising Captain before the Jade Emperor’s throne. Similarly, Zhu Eight Rules, as he confessed to Monkey in chapter 19’s autobiographical poem, led a foolish and slothful existence until he was converted by “a true transcendent ” to the austere teachings of Quanzhen alchemy. His ascent to Heaven was rewarded also with an appointment of the Daoist Court as the Marshal of Heavenly Reeds , a naval commander. Finally, the white horse that carrie
d Tripitaka faithfully to India was originally a dragon prince. All the disciples in their previous lives already were deities, but for some form of major transgressions (Monkey for his revolt against Heaven and repeated acts of theft and violence, the Pig for trying to rape the Goddess of the Moon when he was drunk, Sha Monk for breach of imperial etiquette by breaking a crystal wine goblet, and the dragon for setting fire to his father’s palace), they were arrested and exiled to Earth to suffer and to atone for their crimes. To round out the character of the group of the five pilgrims, we learn as well from chapter 12’s poetic biography of the human pilgrim that he shares exactly the same fate as his disciples: “Gold Cicada was his former divine name. / As heedless he was of the Buddha’s talk, / He had to suffer in this world of dust, / To fall in the net by being born a man” (XYJ, p. 131; JW 1: 275). Different antecedent versions of the journey story in literary history might have provided different and even conflicting textual and personal details for these five pilgrims, but the full-length novel enjoys the distinction of bestowing on this community a particular, powerful bond of purposive commonality: for prior crimes and misdeeds, the five of them must suffer and join together on a piacular pilgrimage, the successful completion of which restores and elevates their transcendent status. In this conception of the pilgrims as a unified community, the elements of progressive incarnation favored by Buddhist Jātaka tales are joined seamlessly to the Daoist theme of the “banished immortal ” and his or her redemption.151 The religious ideals and actions mandated for the pilgrims no less than their rewards represent the syncretistic fruits promised by Quanzhen Buddho-Daoism.
