The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1

by Unknown

  This episode has to do with Monkey and three Daoist fiends engaging in a series of contests to determine which party has greater power to produce rain for drought relief. The most memorable detail is probably the hilarious account of how Monkey made the Daoists drink his and his two companions’ urine as holy water. For more politically minded readers, the Daoists’ slander that led to the ruler’s bitter persecution of the Buddhists by elevating the Daoists in his court may well recall some such episodes in the history of China.161 After he had exterminated the animal spirits and enlightened the king and his subjects, Monkey’s parting admonition to the ruler (chapter 47) is that he should never “believe in false doctrines” which, in the context of the episode, decidedly means the belief in Daoism to the exclusion of the other two religions. “I hope,” says Monkey pointedly, “you will honor the unity of the Three Religions: revere the monks, revere also the Daoists, and take care to nurture the talented. Your kingdom, I assure you, will be secure forever” (XYJ, pp. 540–41). The peaceful coexistence of religions, in sum, is the best policy for social stability and a lasting state. That form of coexistence is already taking shape within this community of scripture-seekers.

  At its most basic level of a miracle tale, moreover, the Cart-Slow episode also reveals an obvious affinity with similar stories of agon in magic found in religious texts like the Tanakh. Consider the parallel with Moses’ duel with ancient Egypt’s magicians and sorcerers in the Exodus story (Exodus 7–10) or the Hebrew prophet Elijah’s contest with the priests and prophets of Ba’al (I Kings, 18). As I have pointed out in a previous essay, however, the XYJ story may have first developed also from Buddhist hagiographic sources:162 the life and activities of the Indian monk Amoghavajra (Bukong ) reputed to have helped introduce Tibetan Buddhism to the Tang court during the reigns of Xuanzong (712–56), Suzong (r. 756–63), and Daizong (r. 63–79). Highly honored during his long career under these emperors, during which time he also engaged in magic contests with a Daoist named Luo Gongyuan , at his life’s end he was made a guoshi (Preceptor of State), a title that also belongs to the three Daoist monsters in XYJ. In Bukong’s biography, both emperor Xuanzong and Daizong had requested the monk to pray for rain to relieve severe drought.163

  The three Daoist priests in the novel, we recall, are actually a tiger, a white deer, and a mountain goat, but their names and original natures, interestingly enough, may have come directly from writings on internal alchemy found in the Daoist canon. A large number of texts devoted to various and variant discussions of the physiological alchemist’s quest for longevity has presented a fairly consistent description of how he must reverse the downward bodily flow of spermal essence, pneumatic vitality, and spirit and force these primary vitalities up again along a path in the spine to the top of his head. These elements, so galvanized in the cultivation process called “returning the essence to replenish the brain, huanjing bunao ”,164 are to be visualized as the cargo transported by an ox or buffalo cart , a deer cart , and a goat cart , quite often also referred to as Three River-Carts or River-Chariots (see fig. 3).165

  The neidan process that circulates the three kinds of qi within the body is first named Little Celestial Cycle , which is correlated with the diurnal cycle of twelve [Chinese] hours. It then leads to a complementary, second-stage process named Great Celestial Cycle that is correlated with the annual cycle of 365 days, conducted along two qi circulation tracts, the superintendent (du ) tract that runs up the back of the body and the conception (ren ) that runs up its front.166 According to two contemporary scholars, both processes may underlie episodic allegories that form chapters 32–66, and chapters 67–83, respectively.167

  FIG. 3 The Three Chariots (sanche) as Alchemical Transport. The original diagram is found in “Zhazhu jiejing ,” collected in Xiuzhen shishu , DZ 263, 4: 690; the clarified and enlarged diagram is taken from Farzee Baldrian-Hussein, Procédés secrets du Joyau magique, p. 173, where the Chariot du Buffle, du Cerf, and du Mouton are French translations of the Chariot of Buffalo, of Deer, and of Goat, respectively.

  If the names of the carts give clues about two of the three Great Immortals in the novel (Deer-Strength and Goat-Strength), how should we understand the name of the fictive kingdom Chechi (Cart Slow)? The last word, chi , apparently has the common sense of slowness or tardiness , and the whole name may well refer to the pace of the alchemist’s arduous effort of cultivation , an effort described by Wang Chongyang as “using the three carts to transport [the cargo] up to the Kunlun Peak [the cranial crown] .”168 Among the countless examples that echo this remark, one says: “The Mysterious Pearl flies to top Mount Kunlun; / Day or night the River-Carts do not stop at all , ” (XMGZ-Taipei, p. 325). Or as a modern lexicographer has described the action: “Drawing out the lead and adding mercury, one ferries the great drug beyond the passes. All the way it is like a cart in a river’s water, going upstream against the currents, until [it] is sent back to the Yellow Court , , , , .”169 If we puzzle over the topographic metaphor of guan , we need only consult Wang’s explanation: “When the three carts move, . . . they pass the Celestial Pass to go past the lower Double Passes of Shen and Yu, two anastomotic loci. The Double Pass is the spine ridge , . . . , , . . . , .”170

  With those key depictions, the narration of XYJ’s chapter 44 suddenly takes on meaning beyond matter-of-fact realism: “Pilgrim lowered his cloud gradually to take a closer look. Aha! The cart was loaded with bricks, tiles, . . . and the like. The ridge was exceedingly tall, and leading up to it was a small, spine-like path flanked by two vertical passes, with walls like two giant cliffs. How could the cart be dragged up there , ! . . . . ; , , , ?” (XYJ, p. 406).

  After Monkey had slain the two Daoists who were party to the persecution of the monks, he walked up to the sandy beach and, “exerting his magic power, yanked the cart through the two passes and up the spine ridge before picking it up and smashing it to pieces , , , .” Apart from the sociopolitical theme that is prominent in this entire episode, it is impossible to overlook the allegory when we consider both the novelistic narrative and the technical Daoist terms and figures of speech so pervasively employed.

  There is one more final twist on this emergence of allegorical language appropriated from Daoist texts that has escaped critical attention. Daoists themselves display sophisticated awareness when they resort to the figures of topography and laboratory to depict the materials and methods of outer or inner alchemy. With admirable succinctness, the twelfth-century text Jindan zhizhi by Zhou Wusuo declares that “the furnace and the reaction-vessel will be likened to by means of a human body , and the drugs will be symbolized by the precious substances of bodily organs .”172

  FIG. 4 The Double Passes (shuang guan). This diagram is reproduced from TC 2: 717. The Chinese inscription of two graphs to the left reads piyu , often translated as “metaphor” but literally, the term can mean analogous symbolism.171

  The diagram of the human body cavity as topography referred to in Schipper and Verellen’s The Taoist Canon (TC) cited earlier carries the label “analogous illustration or symbolism, piyu .” The crucial term in this context is, of course, the word pi, meaning to inform (gao ), to liken, to compare, to illustrate, or to suppose, and it is often translated as a simile or metaphor in modern usages. Historically, the word has played a sustained and hugely important role in Chinese linguistics and language philosophy, ranging from being one of the six foundational principles of the Chinese graph (e.g., qupi ) formulated by the ancient lexicologist Xu Shen (fl. 100 CE), through interaction with medieval Buddhism to assume the translated name of analogy or Avadāna—the eighth of the twelve divisions of the Mahāyana canon—to appearing in numerous titles on rhetoric by Chinese authors secular or religious, and finally, to even theological treatises on analogy by early modern Jesuit missionaries in China.173 One unnoticed example of this word’s munificent suggestiveness across the centuries occurs at the very beginning of the 1754 version of The Story of the Stone: “Story of the
Stone is what likens itself to what the Stone had recorded as events .”174 The intriguing implications of so pithy an assertion of metaphorical representation for understanding fiction in China have yet to be fathomed.

  Finally, we are prepared to see how religion and literature converge in the making of the journey’s fiction, all without a trace of didacticism or proselytism. The fiction of XYJ is built upon a fundamental irony: it not only freely altered the historical account of a Buddhist cleric’s ineradicable acts of devotion to his faith but also transformed its meaning by means of linguistic signs massively appropriated from other religious traditions.175 This act of fiction-making is analogous to scouring Islamic concepts and terms from the Koran to make a new Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Commedia! The wonder is that the Chinese novel has stitched so seamlessly a fabric of three religions that remained in tension (and occasionally in serious conflict) with one another down through history. The company of five pilgrims, on the other hand, does not merely become a harmonious community at the end; throughout the narrative, it also evolves steadily into different aspects of a single person in his development toward some form of psychic and physiological integration.

  In a previous essay, I had observed how the five pilgrims as some aspects of the human self interacting and traveling within a physical body might “conjure up the rather bizarre image” similar to “the diminished figures of Issac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage coursing through the bloodstream.”176 I hardly expected in 1982 that my little comparison would have been anticipated four centuries ago by these words of a precious scroll text, the Qingyuan Miaodao Xiansheng Zhenjun Yiliao Zhenren huguo youmin zhongxiao Erlang Baojuan :

  [The pilgrims] Walking forward,

  Dash toward Thunder-Clap.

  Persons and horse make up these five monks.

  The Tang Monk follows the Horse of the Will,

  While Mind Monkey is our Sun Wukong.

  Zhu Eight Rules—

  Essence, breath, and spirit;

  Sha Monk, the xue vessels [xuemai ],177 course through the whole body. . . .

  Analogic words of the Tang Monk will never leave his person , , . , . , ; . . . . .178

  As the scripture-seeking story evolves from the Song to the Ming, the trend becomes stronger to interpret the pilgrims and their experience as imagistic embodiment, enactment, and synthesis of philosophical and religious abstractions that also exist as mutual glosses. Not only might the XYJ author be a Confucian scholar, as Lu Xun has observed, but the principal human protagonist in Tripitaka must also be even more of one who is at the same time on his way to becoming a Daoist adept and an enlightened Buddhist priest, much as the Monkey of the Mind will progressively become Tripitaka’s own true mind even when the disciple figure at the end will be transformed into a realized immortal (zhenxian), acquiring simultaneously the title, Buddha Victorious in Strife.

  The hundred-chapter novel’s hermeneutics of deliberate integration has sparked and sustained authorial creativity to imagine, in the most ingenious and unprecedented ways, the malleable fluidity of linguistic meaning. This is the sign of the greatest allegorical literature, for fiction is literally generated by the figuration of language. The late literary comparativist Paul de Man has written on the “allegorical dimension” as constituting “the real depth of literary insight” in “the work of all genuine writers” by citing the famous lines from “Le Cygne” in Les fluers du mal, by French modernist poet Charles Baudelaire,179

  [N]ew palaces and scaffoldings, new blocks,

  Old suburbs, all become for me an allegory.

  Such lines expressive of the “poetic state of mind” in Western writings, however, may bear an even truer semblance to “the inner landscape” described and celebrated in Daoist writings. According to Kristofer Schipper, the eminent authority on Daoism, “‘the body is a country’ . . . with mountains and rivers, ponds, forests, paths and barriers, a whole landscape laid out with dwellings, palaces, towers, walls, and gates sheltering a vast population.”180 Schipper’s words, of course, are based on the striking series of similes drawn by the Daoist Ge Hong of early medieval times:

  Thus the body of a person is the image of a state: the locales of chest and abdomen are like palaces and halls; the order of the four limbs is like the settings of suburbs; the separation into bones and joints is like the hundred officials. Spirit is similar to a ruler, blood is similar to subjects, and the pneumatic vitality is similar to the people. Therefore, if one knows how to govern the body, one will know how to govern a state , . , . , . , . . . . .181

  In view of this predilection for analogy found in Daoist discourse, the novel’s tendency may seem to surpass even its religious sources on the multiplication of metaphors: for if the Daoist visualization (neiguan ) of the human body’s interior can come to expression only in allegorical language as the Kunlun Peak , the Mount of Jade Capital , the Mansion of Blue Tenuity , the City of Purple Gold , and so forth,182 the art of The Journey to the West is to make sport of such allegory by making more allegory. After all, Daoist writings abundantly exploit this practice of seemingly unbridled extension of signs. One example can be found in the XMGZ-Taipei, p. 340:

  Thus [an authority] says, “One thing divides into two, and one can know the things’s two names.” But the elixir scriptures dare not leak out the names of these two things. That is why there are many types of cunning symbols—a myriad words and a thousand names—innumerable indeed. Take, for example, when one speaks of the nature of one’s head, the metaphor may be mercury, dragon, fire, root, sun, soul, the li-trigram [], the qian-trigram [], the ji-celestial stem, heaven, ruler, emptiness, hare, nothingness, lord, floating, vermilion, an island rising from the sea, a fair girl, and Mount Kunlun . . . . : , . , ; , , . , : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

  Such an antinomian view of referentiality may outrage Confucians insistent on the rectification of names, but it may also gladden the heart of even a jaded contemporary poststructuralist. According to the German thinker Walter Benjamin, the figurative descriptions in metaphor and allegory indicate “precisely the non-being of what [they] represent.”183 Benjamin’s judgment is validated by our Chinese novel’s persistent and pervasive practice that allegorizes further its own selected language and diction to produce plots, characters, events, experiences, and reflexive commentaries of literary fiction. Thus the “double passes (shuangguan)” and “interlocking ridge (jiaji)” envisaged in the Daoist spinal column generated an intricate tale of bitter contests between Buddhists and Daoists, revealing the difficulties and dangers of error in both method and material confronting the self-cultivating alchemist. The chain of signs in the series of association and correlation can be nearly endless, as lengthy and magnificent as the imagined pilgrimage from China to India to fetch scriptures.

  For more than a couple of generations of Chinese critics, Lu Xun’s classification of the Xiyouji as the chef-d’oeuvre among the novels of gods and demons (shenmo xiaoshuo) had served as a normative designation, to which the first professional translator of this novel into English, Arthur Waley, had also added his own understanding:

  [T]he idea that the hierarchy in Heaven is a replica of government on earth is an accepted one in China. Here as so often the Chinese let the cat out of the bag, where other countries leave us guessing. It has often enough been put forward as a theory that a people’s gods are the replica of its earthly rulers. In most cases the derivation is obscure. But in Chinese popular belief there is no ambiguity. Heaven is simply the whole bureaucratic system transferred bodily to the empyrean.184

  To this reasonable but somewhat simplistic affirmation of Durkheimian collectivity, Hamlet’s words on Shakespeare’s stage sound a needed caveat: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” As this analysis of parts of the novel hopes to make clear, passage between earth and the empyrean flows through a course of two-way traffic. Another cat escaping from our Chinese bag reveals that the celesti
al and the cosmic—indeed, the divine and the demonic—may be transferred just as readily back to the firmly terrestrial, to the somatic aspects of the body and the intensely human self.

  “The Bodhisattva and the monster,” to recall Guanyin’s words to her monkey disciple in chapter 17 of the novel, “both exist in a single thought. Considered in terms of their origin, they are all nothing.” “Nothing will come of nothing,” rages King Lear famously to his hapless Cordelia, but Shakespeare, their creator, knows differently when he “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (A Midsummer-Night’s Dream 5. 1. 16–17). So does a contemporary novelist when she asserts that “the triumph over nothingness that art represents is assured of a future beyond even our ability to imagine. We acclaim the marvelous in ourselves.”185 Such triumph, too, finds magnificent representation in the enduring art of The Journey to the West.

  ONE

  The divine root conceives, its source revealed;

  Mind and nature nurtured, the Great Dao is born.

  The poem says:

  Ere Chaos’s divide, with Heav’n and Earth a mess,

  No human appeared in this murkiness.

  When Pan Gu broke the nebula apart,1

  The dense and pure defined, did clearing start.