The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1

by Unknown

  29. See Hu Shi 1923, pp. 368–70; Lu Xun , Zhongguo xiaoshuo de lishi de bianqian (Lectures originally given in 1924; reprint Hong Kong, 1957), p. 19; Huang Zhigang , Zhongguo de shuishen (Shanghai, 1934), p. 178; Wolfram Eberhard, Die chinesische Novelle des. 17–19. Jahrhunderts, suppl. 9 to Artibus Asiae (Ascona, Switzerland, 1948), p. 127; Wu Xiaoling , “Xiyouji yu Lomoyan shu ,” Wenxue yanjiu , 2 (1958), 168; and Ishiada Eiichirō, “The Kappa Legend,” Folklore Studies (Peking) 9 (1950): 125–26.

  30. Antecedents, p. 148.

  31. See Hu Shi (1923), pp. 370–72. After Hu’s essay, the Indian prototype of the monkey hero was advocated by various scholars. They include Chen Yinque , “Xiyouji Xuanzang dizi gushi de yanbian ”, LSYYCK 2 (1930): 157–60; Zheng Zhenduo , “Xiyouji de yanhua ,” first published 1933, reprinted in Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu (3 vols., Beijing, 1957), 1:291–92; and more recently Huang Mengwen , Songdai baihua xiaoshuo yanjiu (Singapore, 1971), pp. 177–78.

  32. The translated edition refers to The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India. I (Bālakānda), trans. Robert P. Goldman (Princeton, 1984); II (Ayodhyākānda), trans. Sheldon I. Pollock (Princeton, 1986); III (Āranyakānda), trans. Sheldon I. Pollock (Princeton, 1991); IV (Kiskindhākānda), trans. Rosalind Lefeber (Princeton, 1994); and V (Sundarakānda), trans. Robert P. Goldman (Princeton, 1994).

  33. Wu, pp. 168–69.

  34. Antecedents, p. 162.

  35. See the informative study by Meir Shahar, “The Lingyin Si Monkey Disciples and the Origins of Sun Wukong,” HJAS 52 (June 1992): 193–224.

  36. “Many Shaiva family portraits include the pets. Skanda has his peacock, Ganesha his bandicoot, Shiva his bull, and Parvati her lion. For this is another way, in addition to full-life avatars and periodic theophanies, in which the Hindu gods become present in our world. Most gods and goddesses (apart from the animal, or animal from the waist or neck down, or animal from the waist or neck up forms of the deities) are accompanied by a vehicle (vahana), an animal that serves the deity as a mount. In contrast with the Vedic gods who rode on animals you could ride on (Surya driving his fiery chariot horses, Indra on his elephant Airavata or driving his bay horses), the sectarian Hindu gods sit cross-legged on their animals or ride sidesaddle, with the animals under them presented in profile and the gods full face. Sometimes the animal merely stands beside the deity, both of them stationary.” Thus observes Wendy Doniger keenly in her recent and magisterial study, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York, 2009), pp. 398–99. For more accounts of animals and religion, see pp. 233–45, 255–56, 315–16, and 436–38.

  37. One has to think only of the Fengshen yanyi (Investiture of the Gods), a novel published possibly at about the same time as the full-length XYJ, to recall how many animals—including strange beasts and mythical marine creatures—serve as appointed beasts of burden for different deities of a multitudinous and largely Daoist pantheon.

  38. R.H. Van Gulik, The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore (Leiden, 1967), pp. 18–75.

  39. According to Zhang Jinchi , “Xiyouji” kaolun (Harbin, 1997) p. 116, note 1, of the twenty-five entries on “monkeys yuanhou” in the TPGJ, j 444–46, eleven of these are colored by Daoist elements and four by Buddhist.

  40. Antecedents, p. 159, and this point is repeated in his more recent article “The His-yu Chi Monkey and the Fruits of the Last Ten Years,” Hanxue yanjiu , 6/1 (1988): 474–75.

  41. Antecedents, p. 159.

  42. Isobe Akira , “Gempon Saiyūki ni okeru Son gyōsha no keisei—Ko gyōsha kara Son gyōsha e’ —,” Shūkan tōyō gaku 38 (1977): 103–27, incorporated as chapter 7, “Son Gokū zō no keisei to sono hatten ,” in Isobe, pp. 215–47. The story cited by Dudbridge from the Yijianzhi in j 6 (4 vols., Beijing, 1981), 1: 47 is titled “Zongyan’s Disposition of the Monkey Monster ,” but the name changes to “The Record of the Monkey-King God of Fuzhou ” in such other Song story collections as the Songren baijia xiaoshuo and the Zhandeng conghua . As a further linkage to the XYJ evolving tradition, Isobe (p. 247) cites another story found in the Fuzhou County Gazette , j 10, that refers to a Monkey King receiving cultic worship in the Nengren Temple as a “Guardian of the Law.” The creature’s considerable magic powers nonetheless eventually cause the chief abbot to exorcise its efficacy and epiphany by inscribing (most likely a passage of Buddhist scripture) on the back of its image.

  43. Translations of the name of this Daoist order include: “Completely Sublimated” (Arthur Waley), “Perfect Realization” (Holmes Welch), “Complete Truth” (Kristofer Schipper), “Complete Perfection” (Nathan Sivin), “Complete Reality” (Thomas Cleary), “Integrating Perfection” (Russell Kirkland, drawing on Igor de Rachewiltz’s translation of quan), and “Completion of Authenticity” (Vincent Goossaert and Paul Katz). No one name is sufficient to match the polysemy conveyed in the evolving writings by the order’s patriarchs and disciples, because the term implies at once conditions and processes—a state of primal authenticity and a condition of restored perfection attained through ascesis formulated through deliberate syncretism. Schipper’s decision in TC 2: 1127ff. to render it as “Complete Truth” might have stemmed in part from the tradition’s self-understanding as a reform movement aimed at purifying the different doctrines flourishing in other orders or sects of Daoism. A stele text in the Yuan (erected by Li Ding in 1263), made this claim: “At the beginning of the Jin’s Dading reign period (1161–90), the Patriarch [Wang] Chongyang appeared, using the knowledge of the Way, Virtue, Nature, and Life/Destiny for proclamation as Complete Truth, to purge the spreading defects of a hundred lineages and continue the ultimate knowledge of millennia , , , , .” See the “Da Yuan chongxiu gu louguan Zongshenggong ji” bei cited in Guo Wu , Quanzhen Daozu Wang Chongyan zhuan (Hong Kong, 2001), p. 78. The irony is that the whole thrust of the order’s doctrinal development from Song-Yuan times to subsequent centuries is built on a self-conscious effort to integrate and harmonize the Three Religions (of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism). See Schipper, TC 2: 1127ff.

  44. See “Xiuzhen shishu Wuzhenpian ,” j 30 (the juan or chapter is entitled “Songs and Odes to the Lineage of Chan ,” in DZ 263, 4: 746. This ode apparently enjoyed such popularity that it has been used frequently as an “independent” composition to express the notion of Buddhist and Daoist enlightenment attained through one’s own mind and self-knowledge. The popularity extends well into the mid-Qing period and beyond. For its printing as an interlinear commentary of the Heart Sūtra, see Zhu Di , annot., Jin’gang boruo Boluomi jing jizhu (Shanghai, 1984), pp. 172–73. My thanks are due Professor Qiancheng Li for identifying this last particular use of the ode. The first line of Zhang’s ode, in fact, uses verbatim a sentence that has filled the pages of many volumes of Buddhist scriptures from different lineages, and it is one particularly favored by Chan Buddhism. The sentence is the celebrated assertion—“jixin jifo ,” and the rhetoric’s punning repetition may be translated as “This Mind That’s Buddha”—that appears repeatedly in such texts as the Jingde chuandeng lu , #2076, T 51: 0253b and 0457a; the Fayan Chanshi yulu , #1905, T 47: 0651a; and especially in the pages of Lizu dashi fabao tanjing , #2008, T 48: 0355a, where the assertion is further glossed by the Patriarch Huineng thus: “Where no forethought is begotten is the mind; where afterthought is not extinguished is Buddha , .” This doctrine of the complete reciprocity of Mind and Buddha, however, is not universally affirmed in Chinese Buddhism. For an astute analysis of its historical development and contestation in Chan Buddhism, see Ge Zhaoguang , Zhongguo chan sixiangshi—cong 6 shiji dao 9 shiji —69 (Beijing, 1995), pp. 315–32. The interesting phenomenon in the DZ—the Daoist Zhang Boduan composing what he called doctrinal lyrics to celebrate the Chan lineage—should indicate the explicit syncretism of the Quanzhen Order already in the eleventh century.

  45. Antecedents, p. 162.

  46. Ji Xianlin, Luomoyan’na chutan (7 vols., Beijing, 1979), p. 136. See also his study, “The Rāmāyaṇa in China ,” in his F
ojiao yu Zhong-Yin wenhua jiaoliu shi (Nanchang, Jiangxi, 1990), pp. 78–118, which is a much lengthier essay supporting and complementing Victor Mair’s essay cited in note 47. Another important study charting the possible Tibetan transmission of the Indian story to China is found in Liu Ts’un-yan [Cunren] , “Zangben Luomoyan’na benshi sijian ,” in Daojia yu Daoshu, Hefengtang wenji xubian , (Shanghai, 1999), pp. 154–93. For Ji’s translation of the epic, see Luomoyan’na (Beijing, 1980–84). Other previous selective translations of the Indian epic include “Luomoyan’na” yu “Mahapalada” , trans. Sun Yong (Beijing, 1962), and the pioneering version by Mi Wenkai , Gu Yindu liangda shishi (Hong Kong, 1951; reprint Taipei, 1967).

  47. Victor Mair, “Suen Wu-kung = Hanumat? The Progress of a Scholarly Debate,” in Proceedings on the Second International Conference on Sinology, Academia Sinica (Taipei, June 1989): 659–752.

  48. On the varying means of disseminating the Indian epic and the consequential modifications of the plot and form of “the Rāma story,” see A.K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” originally presented to the Conference on Comparison of Civilization (Pittsburgh, 1987); reprint in Vinay Dharwadker, ed., The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 131–60; and Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey (Oxford, 2007), esp. chapter 4. For further studies of Chinese and Indian literary relations, see the informative entries in Zhong-Yin wenxue guanxi yuanliu , ed. Yu Longyu (Changsha, Hunan, 1986).

  49. Mair, 675.

  50. Ibid., 679.

  51. The story’s title, as Mi Wenkai pointed out in the preface to his selective translation of the Indian epics, may have been a mistranslation, confusing Daśaratha (“Ten Chariots,” the real name of Rāma’s father) with Daśarata (“Ten Luxuries or Excesses”). The point is repeated in Mair.

  52. Mair, 682–83.

  53. Ramnath Subbaraman, “Beyond the Question of the Monkey Imposter: Indian Influence on the Chinese Novel, The Journey to the West,” Sino-Platonic Papers 114 (March 2002): 26. For discussion of the parallels between R and the novel’s Scarlet-Purple Kingdom episode, see pp. 18–25; XYJTY, 1: 194–204; Mair, 724–25.

  54. Surviving remnants of encyclopedia have been published in fascimile by Beijing’s Zhonghua shuju (1960). For the Chinese text of the particular section under discussion, see Zheng Chenduo, 1: 270–72.

  55. Antecedents, p. 63; see also pp. 179–88 for the Chinese text and translation.

  56. See ibid, pp. 73–74 for a detailed listing. The Korean reader repeatedly mentions a text named “Tripitaka Tang’s Record of the Journey to the West, Tang Sanzang Xiyouji ,” which is described, moreover, as a first-class “plain or commentarial narrative, pinghua .” See XYJYJZL, pp. 248–54. Most contemporary Chinese scholars now assume that a lost text that may well be characterized as a Xiyouji pinghua was in wide circulation in early Ming, the contents of which closely resemble parts of the twenty-four act drama and the full-length novel of 1592.

  57. Antecedents, pp. 73–74.

  58. Originally in Shibun 9, 1–10, 3. I use here the text included in the Yuanquxuan waibian , ed. Sui Shusen (3 vols., Beijing, 1959), 2: 633–94.

  59. See Sun Kaidi , “Wu Cheng’en yu zaju Xiyouji ,” first published 1939, reprinted in Cangzhouji (2 vols., Beijing, 1965), 2: 366–98; Yan Dunyi , “Xiyouji he gudian xiqu di guanxi ,” first published 1954, reprinted in LWJ, pp. 142–52; and Antecedents, pp. 76–80.

  60. See “Xiyouji zubenkao de zai shangque ,” Xinya xuebao 6 (1964): 4977–518; and “The Hundred-Chapter Hsi-yu chi and its Early Versions,” Asia Major, n.s. 14 (1969): 141–91, hereafter cited as “Early Versions.” Important studies more recently include XTYTY, 1: 4–164; Plaks, pp. 189–202; Isobe, pp. 145–214, 273–338; Ōta, passim; Liu Ts’un-yan, “Lun Ming-Qing Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo zhi banben ,” and “Siyouji de Ming keben ,” in HFTWJ, 2: 1095–166, 3: 1260–318; and Li Shiren , Xiyouji kaolun (Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 1991), pp. 123–86.

  61. “Early Versions,” 155–57; XYJTY 1: 117–18.

  62. See XYJTY 1:51; Li Shiren, pp. 124–28.

  63. “Early Versions,” p. 151.

  64. The printing house Shidetang was located in Nanjing, a crucial city of flourishing printing houses and book trade that complemented the commercial and literary activities found in the northern Fujian area of Jianyang . Shidetang was an established enterprise well known for its various publications of literati drama, full-length prose fictions, and even scripts of civil service examinations. For its activities and a few other noted Jiangnan printing houses, see Xiaoshuo shufanglu , eds. Wang Qingyuan et al. (Beijing, 2002) p. 15; Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1998), chapter 3, esp. pp. 140–52; Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA, 2002), chapter 5, esp. pp. 171–74; and also “Of three Mountains Street: The Commercial Publishers of Ming Nanjing,” in Printing and Book Culture in Later Imperial China, ed. Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 107–51; Zhang Xiumin , Zhongguo yinshua shi (Shanghai, 1989), pp. 340–53; and Miao Yonghe , Mingdai chuban shigao (Nanjing, 2000), pp. 72–74, where it is noted that there might have been two publishing houses by the same name of Shidetang run by household or lineage related family members with the name of Tang . As Dudbridge has detailed for us, the Shidetang stemma actually consists of three distinct versions thus far known to us: (1) the “Huayang” editions because of the text’s repeated reference to the Huayang Grotto-Heaven Master “checking” the text, and all bearing the name of Xinke chuxiang guanban dazi Xiyouji [A newly engraved, illustrated Journey to the West set with the large characters of official blocks]; (2) the edition titled Dingqie jingben quanxiang Tangseng qujing Xiyouji [A newly engraved, capital edition of the Tang Monk’s Journey to the West to Fetch Scriptures, completely illustrated], with title-page identification of Yang Minzhai as printer and publisher, and the Qingbaitang as the publishing house, and its earliest date may be set at 1603; and (3), the Erke guanban Tang Sanzang Xiyouji [A second engraving or printing of the official edition of Tripitaka Tang’s Journey to the West], with publisher named as Zhu Jiyuan and dating possibly to 1631. Extant versions of the 1592 edition include one preserved in the National Beijing Library’s rare book department (transferred to Taiwan’s National Palace Museum after 1949), one in the collection of Japan’s Tenri Library, and one in microfilm at the Library of Congress.

  65. “Early Versions,” p. 184. Belonging to the same textual stemma of this edition was another group of extant editions appearing during the subsequent three and a half decades, all bearing the title of Li Zhuowu xiansheng piping Xiyouji , many copies of which have been preserved in either institutional or personal collections scattered in Japan, Taiwan, and the British Museum, with two microfilmed versions deposited at the libraries of Yale University and the University of Chicago. The language of this edition follows fairly closely that of the Shidetang’s narrative, but it lacks both the important preface by Chen Yuanzhi which we shall discuss later and, like the 1592 version, the “Chen Guangrui story” as well. Recent critical editions of the work include Wu Cheng’en, Xiyouji jiaozhu , ed. Xu Shaozhi , and annotated by Zhou Zhongming and Zhu Tong (Taipei, 1996); and Li Zhuowu xiansheng piping Xiyouji , eds. Chen Hong and Yang Bo (2 vols., Changsha, Hunan, 2006).

  66. Plaks, p. 190.

  67. See Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, 1991); McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago, 1985); Anne E. McLaren, “Ming Audiences and Vernacular Hermeneutics: The Uses of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” TP 81 (1995): 51–80; McLaren, “Constructing New Reading Publics in Late Ming China,” in Brokaw and Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture, pp. 152–83; and Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, pp. 290–326.

  68. See XYJ, pp. 1–7. The six other editions utilized by the Beijing publisher include:

 
Xinjuan chuxiang guben Xiyou Zhengdaoshu , 100 chapters but slightly abridged. Dated to 1662, this edition has two distinguishing features: it contains the controversial “chapter 9 on the Chen Guangrui story,” and it has a preface attributed to Yu Ji (1272–1348), a major scholar of the Southern Song. Named editors are identified as Huang Taihong and Wang Xiangxu.

  Xiyou zhenquan , ed. Chen Shibin (styled Wuyizi ), with a preface dated to 1694 and another preface dated to 1696 by the noted Qing poet, essayist, and dramatist You Tong (1618–1704); 100 chapters but slightly abridged; contains “the Chen Guangrui story.”

  Xinshuo Xiyouji , ed. Zhang Shushen , with two extant unabridged hundred-chapter versions dated similarly to 1749. It has one-hundred chapters based on the Shidetang text, with comprehensive commentary noted for its advocacy of Neo-Confucianism.