The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1

by Unknown

  123. History locates Xuanzang’s burial site in Fanchuan , about forty miles south of the capital Chang’an. In 880 CE, when the city fell to the forces of the rebel Huang Chao (see CHC, 3/1: 745–50), the tomb was destroyed but somehow parts of the monk’s skeletal remains (a skull and other fragments) were discovered by the Abbot Kezhi at the Zige Monastery on Mount Zhongnan in 1027, during the Tiansheng era of the Song Emperor Renzong. The abbot accompanied their transfer all the way southeast to Jinling (the modern Nanjing), where the remains were reburied. Discovered by Japanese occupation troops in 1942, the remains were first brought to Japan and then flown back to Taiwan in 1955. See SZZSHB, pp. 842–59, and the special volume, Jinian Xuanzang dashi linggu guiguo feng’an zhuanji (Taipei, 1977) for detailed accounts by both Chinese and Japanese scholars. The burial site’s distant relocation, if true, would shed light on how the Xuanzang legend since the Northern Song had received its diverse and divergent elaborations, connecting it to different geographical areas. Sometimes, there would be the report (e.g., in the dramatic version) on his birthplace and rearing near China’s southeastern coast; another account (e.g., the Korean reader; see XYJYJZL, p. 248) would mention the Shaanxi origin.

  124. The monk or abbot has different names in different accounts in the evolution of Xuanzang’s personal history, one of which is Faming . Chinese and Japanese scholars concentrating on “evidential scholarship ” endlessly speculate on the origin or reason for such variations, including possibly the fear of incurring the taboo of one nominal graph violating imperial names or titles. The scholarship shows little interest in understanding the fictional development of the story complex, in which the principal characters (both Xuanzang and his disciples) all have had a multiplicity of names in different accounts and texts, where also different deities may perform the same roles or functions (e.g., whether it was Guanyin or the South Pole Star God who sent the prenatal Xuanzang to his mother as a divine gift).

  125. In developing the significant theme of transcendent motivation for seeking scripture, the play also differs from the full-length novel. Throughout the zaju, the Buddha himself is never seen, though his presence is presumed. Concerning the scripture enterprise, Guanyin’s spoken soliloquy that opens the play ascribes the desire to impart scriptures to the Land of the East to the assembled disciples beneath Buddha’s throne. Their discussion (), in fact, results in their selection of the human priest and gives his preincarnate identity as Variocana Buddha (reading as ). See Xiyouji zaju, p. 623. The identity is noteworthy because it affirms the venerable association of the human priest with the Chan (Zen) lineage of Buddhism in the popular imagination, an association that, in turn, might have found easy acceptance and further exploitation in Quanzhen Daoism. Vairocana, after all, is the leader of the Five Dhyāna lineage or Chanzong , founded upon the core emphasis of Dhyāna, meditation or chanding . The selection of the scripture pilgrim by the general assembly is also significant to the extent that it seems to indicate a decision reached by a peer group. Chapter 8 of the full-length novel, on the other hand, changed this decision to that of the Buddha’s sovereign compassion alone. When he then queried the silent assembly as to who would be willing to undertake a journey to the Land of the East to find the appropriate pilgrim, Guanyin answered the call with words and forthrightness not unlike the episode on the prophet’s commission in Isaiah 6 of the Tanakh.

  126. So Henry Y.H. Zhao, “Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture,” in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton, 2006), pp. 69–83.

  127. The historical Xuanzang’s own words on when and how he left China are as follows: “in the fourth month of the third year of the Zhenguan reign period (630 CE), braving the transgression of the articles of law, I departed for India on my own authority” (FSZ in SZZSHB, p. 126). Perhaps applying in confusion this year to the legend, the dramatic version of the Chen Guangrui story announces that Xuanzang was born on the fifteenth of the tenth month of Zhenguan 3 (Xiyouji zaju, p. 639), but this would mean that Xuanzang’s selection as the scripture pilgrim at age eighteen or older would have to take place in Zhenguan 21 or later. Historically, most scholars agreed that by Zhenguan 19 (645), Xuanzang had already returned to Tang territory after his long pilgrimage. With respect to the novel, the chapter 9 paragraph opening common to both the spurious and the Shidetang versions, however, dates the pilgrim’s selection to year 13, and this is reconfirmed in chapter 100 of all full-length versions, when the emperor’s own words record his date of reunion with his commissioned priest as Zhenguan 27 (XYJ, p. 1126). The impossible chronology of the controversial chapter 9 would have made the pilgrim’s selection in the same year that his father was appointed zhuangyuan prior to his conception.

  128. Chapter 12: . . . . . In subsequent chapters, the rescript is always referred to as the tongguan wendie (literally, the rescript for going through a pass) that, in the overall emplotment of the novel, has immense political and religious significance yet to be studied.

  129. For what might well have been regard for harmonizing numerical symbolism in the text, in this particular instance having to do with Buddhism, the novel reduces the length of the pilgrimage to fourteen years, making the number of days on the journey 5,040 days (i.e., 360 x 14). At the story’s very end, the Buddha added eight more days (see the Patriarch’s words at the end of chapter 98) for the pilgrims’s return from India to Chang’an and then back again to India under divine escorts, making the grand total of 5,048 days to correspond exactly to the canonical number of “scrolls, juan” first identified with the Kaiyuan shijiao lu compiled by Zhisheng in 730 CE.

  130. A conclusion also reached by Cao Bingjian, “‘Chun Ru’ renge de fasi yu pipan—Tang seng xinlun ‘’—,” Zhongzhou Xuekan 4 (July 1999): 109–11. See esp. Cao’s citations (p. 110) of the Tang Monk’s use of Confucian rhetoric and ideals in his discourse in chapters 24, 27, 36, 47, and 80 of the novel.

  131. Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China, p. 321. As a representative text of this lineage, see Vasubandhu , Wei Shih Er Shi Lun , or “The Treatise in Twenty Stanzas on Representation-only” (New Haven, AOS, 1938).

  132. Ch’en, Buddhism in China, pp. 322–25.

  133. This is a virtual paraphrase of a line from the Mahāparīnirvāṇa sūtra , #374, in T 12: 488b: “all sentient beings possess the nature of Buddha .” The assertion is repeated endlessly throughout this lengthy scripture. As will be seen in what follows immediately, whether all beings indeed could be so predicated and in what way(s) could one realize Buddha’s nature in oneself became the cardinal points of debate in Chan Buddhism. This line of teaching had an enormous impact on Song Neo-Confucianism, and it was readily picked up and elaborated further by Quanzhen patriarchs from the time of Zhang Boduan in the tenth century.

  134. For example, apart from the two famous poems (by the priest Shenxiu and answered by the acolyte Huineng ) on the metaphor of the mind as mirror and on whether its clarity depends on its original purity or constant cleaning in Tanjing, chapter 1, and The Platform Scripture, section 6, numerous other such verse dialogues and disputations appear in all the subsequent segments of the text. The canonical name of the scripture is Liuzu Dashi Fabao Tanjing in #2008, T 48: 435b ff. Among the thirty-plus versions of this scripture in four stemmas, the Dunhuang text of the sūtra in manuscript form and discovered in the first half of the twentieth century is acknowledged to be the earliest, dating possibly to the eighth century. For the Dunhuang text, I use The Platform Scripture, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New York, 1963). For the received text, I use Liuzu Tanjing , (Taipei, 1997), a modern critical edition with vernacular translation and annotation by Li Zhonghua .

  135. This difference in the enlightenment process further divided the lineage into the Northern and Southern Schools. A succinct summary of the schools’s divergent views may be found in Wing-tsit Chan’s introduction to his translation of The Platform Scripture, pp. 14–16. See also John R. McRae, The Northern School and the For
mation of Early Ch’an Buddhism (Honolulu, 1986); and Ge Zhaoguang, Zhongguo Chan sixiangshi, pp. 46–112. Ma Tianxiang in Zhongguo Chanzong sixiang fazhan shi , rev. ed. (Wuhan, 2007), p. 19, has this observation: “sudden enlightenment is the transcendence of linguistic signs and the severance of thinking by ordinary logic. Directly, it grasps the totality of an indivisible principle , , , .” A revisionist study exerting an enormous impact on Western scholarship on Chan in the last two decades is Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton, 1991). For some astute analysis of the topoi of means and media in the tradition, see esp. chapters 2 and 3.

  136. Martina Darga, “Xingming guizhi,” in ET 2: 1106. Joseph Needham, in SCC, V/5 (1983): 229–30, dates it to the end of the sixteenth century because the first edition appeared in 1615. This would place the text’s production less than twenty years after the first publication of XYJ.

  137. The two parallel sentences are found verbatim in the following: “,” in #2814, T85: 1136c; “,” in # 2008, T48: 032a; “,” in #2076, T51: 0236b; “” in #1985, T47: 0502b; “,” in #2062, T50: 0920a.

  138. See Wang Shouren, “Chongxiu Shanyin xian xueji ,” in Wang Wengcheng Gong quanshu , eds. Wu Guang , et al. (2 vols. Shanghai, 1992), 1: 257.

  139. See note 43.

  140. For some examples of the familiar metaphors of “the Monkey of the Mind” and “the Horse of the Will” studding Buddhist texts, see Zhengfa nianchu jing in #721, T 17: 0024a: “, ”; Nianfo jing in #1966, T 47: 0132c: “”; Fayuan zhulin in #2122, T 53: 0653b: “”; Lebang wenlei in #1969A, T 47: 0220a: “.” For examples in Quanzhen writings, see Wang Chongyang , Chongyang quanzhen ji , in DZ 1153, 25: 694: “ / ”; juan 3, 17a: “”; 25: 716: “ / ”; 25: 740: “ / .”

  141. Although my interpretation here does not wholly follow the thesis, fully and astutely articulated by Ping Shao, in “Huineng, Subhūti, and Monkey’s Religion in Xiyou ji,” JAS 65/4 (November 2006): 713–40, I have learned greatly from this splendid study. Professor Shao not only has documented quite thoroughly the Chan concepts and scriptures surfacing in the novel (pp. 713–20), but he also argued that parallels between the novel and Chan writings may lead one to conclude that “Monkey is Huineng reincarnate in terms of his enhanced spiritual nature” (p. 721). Shao next uses incisively the ideas of Zhang Boduan to orient both the pilgrims—and by extension, the attentive readers—to understand the integrative (or syncretistic) movement from strict Buddhism to a Daoist ideal of utilizing Buddhist language, especially that of Chan. In Shao’s view, with which I agree, “Zhang may have accepted Chan philosophy, but he was far from having become a Buddhist. His reliance on the Buddha-nature concept [mingxin jianxing] was simply the highlight of continuous efforts made by the Taoists to bring their own thinking up to date” (p. 731). For further analysis of why Zhang insisted on the cultivation of “golden elixir” requires “intuitive apprehension of Buddhist principles ,” see Zhuang Hongyi , “Bei Song Daoshi Zhang Boduan famo ji qi jindan sixiang ,” in Daojiao yanjiu yu Zhongguo zongjiao wenhua , ed. Li Zhitian (Hong Kong, 2003), pp. 217–50.

  Quanzhen’s Northern patriarch Wang Zhe or Wang Chongyang (1113–1170) and his followers less than a century later continued this aggressive appropriation of certain key notions of Chan for their own use in internal alchemy. It is noteworthy that one of the earliest stele inscriptions erected for Wang by a Jin Daoist cleric official began with these lines: “Now, therefore, each of the Three Religions has its ultimate words and wondrous principles. The person in Buddhism who acquired the mind of Buddha was Bodhidharma, and his religion was named Chan. In the Confucian religion, the person who transmitted the familial learning of Confucius was Zisi, whose book was named The Doctrine of the Mean. The ultimate principles of the Daoist religion encompassing five thousand words were transmitted without utterance and appeared without action. . , , . , , . , , .” See “Zhongnanshan shenxian Chongyang Wang Zhenren Quanzhen Jiaozhu bei ,” in Daojia jinshi lue , comp. Chen Yuan (Beijing, 1988), p. 450. To claim that Bodhidharma alone captured Buddha’s mind (or approbation, an alternative translation of dexin) would likely be met with stiff objections from other Buddhist lineages. But this emhpasis of the Daoist order helps explain the prominent and ubiquitous presence of Chan in the XYJ text. The Quanzhen patriarchs emulated precedents supposedly set by Chan masters that they did not wish to “establish doctrines with language ,” but that reservation did not discourage the Daoist leaders from poetic compositions. Abundant examples from Wang Chongyang’s corpora reveal his understanding of how the extolled unity of the Three Religions, far from being a neatly settled condition, can be affirmed only from the point of view of a dynamic and assertive Quanzhen hermeneutic. In the first four lines of a full-length regulated verse, “When Squire Ren inquired about the Three Religions ,” Wang writes: “The Way passes through Confucian gate and Buddhist house, / For the Three Religions from one ancestor descend. / Awakened wholly, you’d know the ins and outs; / Comprehension permits you feel its breadth and length , , , ” (in Chongyang quanzhen ji , DZ 1153, 25: 693). In another poem, “When asked about Buddhism and Daoism ,” Wang becomes slightly more polemical by insisting that his bluntly partisan perspective makes a difference in understanding another tradition. “The Dao in Buddhism is ever seen as powerless, / But to know Buddhism in Daoism will end love or hate [i.e., conflict]. / Perfecting both Dao and Chan is the lofty student; / Once Daoist-Chan is acquired you’ll be a true monk , , [an allusion to Daodejing 41: ‘When the lofty or superior student hears the Dao, he will be diligent to practice it , ’], ” (DZ 1153, 25: 694). Still, in a third and final example (“A reply to Squire Zhan on the temporal priority of Buddhism over Daoism ”), Wang seeks to help his reader realize that the claim of unity stems from his Order’s particular view of the Three Religions: “Buddhists and Daoists have always been one household, / With two kinds of features but their truths don’t differ. / Knowing the mind to see one’s nature is Quanzhen’s consciousness; / Understanding mercury and lead yields virtuous sprouts , , , ” (DZ 1153, 25: 691).

  142. See Franciscus Verellen, “The Dynamic Design: Ritual and Contemplative Graphics in Daoist Scriptures,” in Daoism in History: Essays in Honour of Liu Ts’un-yan, ed. Benjamin Penny (London and New York, 2006), pp. 175–76.

  143. Yuanqu xuan (3 vols., SBBY), 3: 2 (page numbers in accordance with individual plays).

  144. For a penetrating examination of the problem of mind-and-heart cultivation and its ironic allegorization in the novel, see Lam Ling Hon, “Cannibalizing the Heart: The Politics of Allegory and The Journey to the West,” in Literature, Religion, and East/West Comparison, ed. Eric Ziolkowski (Newark, 2004), pp. 162–180. The so-called sixth-ear macaque, liuer mihou of this episode is indeed a secret double of Sun Wu-kong. The name, meaning metonymically a third pair of ears, signifies a furtive and illegitimate intruder, the uncanny other of the divided self that may also be recalcitrant and subversive. Its very identity is already foreshadowed back in chapter 2 (XYJ, p. 16), when Monkey begged Subodhi to impart to him the formula for immortality: “There is no ‘sixth-ear’ [i.e., a third person] here except your disciple.”

  145. The irony here is that the doctrine of no mind or the avoidance of two minds as a metaphor for mental discrimination is only too familiar to Chan Buddhism. In the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, another foundational text favored by the sect, of which there were four known translations in Chinese, this teaching was also pervasive. See juan 4 of the translation by Bodhiruci, Dasheng ru lengqie jing , #672, T 16: 614b: “ / / / / .” One can also see why so many Chan followers, rightly or wrongly, found Zhuangzi’s thought on ultimate nondiscrimination to be so genial.

  146. Extensive discussion of the motion or movement of the mind is found in Mencius 2A, 2. Mao Zedong declared his unperturbed courage while being surrounded by enemy troops in a 1928 lyric to the tune of “Moon Over West River”: “Enemy troops surround me in ten thousand layers, / But I remain aloof and unmove
d , .” See Mao Zhuxi shici (Beijing, 1974), p. 2a.

  147. See Ren Bantang, 1: 393–412.

  148. Examples of these metaphors are virtually endless in the Canon. See the small collection of poems devoted to the subject in Zhizhenzi longhu huandan shi , in DZ 269, 4: 913–15.

  149. Even a brief and selected citation of some of the most important publications in this area cannot ignore the pioneering works of the past. See Henri Maspero, “Methods of ‘Nourishing the Vital Principle’ in the Ancient Taoist Religion,” in Taoism and Chinese Religion, trans. Frank A. Kireman Jr. (Amherst, MA, 1981), pp. 443–554; and Nathan Sivin, Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1968). Because the technical rhetoric and terminology of internal alchemy (neidan) frequently employ the same vocabulary in physical or external alchemy (waidan), the classic monographs of Chen Guofu , Daozang yuanliu kao , rev. ed. (Taipei, 1975), and Daozang yuanliu xukao (Taipei, 1983) are indispensable references. Other important publications include Isabelle Robinet, Meditation Taoïste (Paris, 1979); Robinet, Introduction à l’alchimie intérieure taoïste: De l’unité et de la multiplicité (Paris, 1995); SCC, V/5 (1983), with invaluable and extensive classified bibliographies in several languages; Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein, Procédés Secrets du Joyau Magique: Traité d’Alchimie Taoïste du XIe siècle (Paris, 1984); Catherine Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humain, Le Xiuzhen Tu (Paris, 1994); Stephen Eskildsen, The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoist Masters (Albany, 2004); Fabrizio Pregardio, Great Clarity and Alchemy in Early Medieval China (Stanford, 2006); Louis Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection: Mysticism and Self-Transformation in Early Quanzhen Daoism (Leiden, 2007); and relevant sections of DH and ET. Chinese books on the subject are legion, but one must sift through a huge amount of publications in diverse fields (e.g., on medicine, athletics, qigong, and religion) to determine which are the useful titles. For the ongoing work of interpreting and annotating the present translation, I have learned from Zhang Rongming , Zhongguo gudai qigong yu xian-Qin zhexue (Shanghai, 1987); Tian Chengyang , Xianxue xiangshu (Beijing, 1999); Hao Qin , Longhu dandao (Chengdu, 1994); Lu Guolong , Daojiao zhexue (Beijing, 1997); Zhang Guangbao , Tang-Song neidan daojia (Shanghai, 2001); and Ge Guolong , Daojiao neidanxue shuyuan (Taipei, 2004).