AFTERWORD

Journey to the West is one of the greatest treats in Chinese literature. In its present form, the one translated here, it has been enjoyed by countless readers for almost four hundred years, and episodes in the book have been the basis for many a tale and an opera through which many more people have known the story than have read it. It has been adapted for the large and small screen and been turned into comic books. Every child brought up in the Chinese world wants to be Sun Wukong, and would rather laugh at the greedy and idle Bajie than be compared to him.

Of all the Chinese fantasy novels published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it is the only one to have become so central to Chinese culture and remain so popular. It won its popularity at a time when fiction was not taken seriously, and hundreds of years before it became regarded as one of the great classics of Chinese literature.

Pinning down this marvellous book and its appeal to the reader is not easy. The structure of the book is casual; the plots of its episodes all end in predicable success for the travellers; and there are only three fully developed characters in the whole vast story. And yet the book works, and works triumphantly well.

Before trying to answer the question of why it works, there is an even more basic one to deal with: what is Journey to the West? The question is not a new one: in one form or another it has been asked for nearly four hundred years, and the answers have been many and contradictory. There is no single explanation. Whenever anyone thinks that Wukong is caught by a formula he springs out of the trap on his somersault cloud. So rather than offer any single interpretation I prefer to consider the novel from a number of different approaches.

Can we call it a novel? In the sense that A Dream of Red Mansions or most of the great nineteenth-century European novels are novels, the answer must be no. They are, or attempt to be, integrated wholes, structures in which the component parts are all more or less interdependent and essential, the creation of a single mind (even if left incomplete to be tidied up by others, as was A Dream of Red Mansions). The Journey is no such thing. It is a string of stories that developed over many hundreds of years before being put into the definitive version we now have at some time in the middle or later sixteenth century. But if we take “novel” to mean an extended piece of fiction, that it certainly is, and it is in that more general sense that I use the word here.

The component stories, which number between thirty and fifty depending on how one divides them up, fall into three main groups. Of the book’s hundred chapters the first twelve tell of the earliest life of two of the chief characters, Sun Wukong and Tang Sanzang, and of the circumstances in which Emperor Taizong sends Sanzang off on his journey to the Western Heaven to visit the Rulai Buddha and fetch the Mahayana scriptures. The best of these chapters are the first seven, dealing with Wukong’s origins and his career as the king of the monkeys on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit who twice rebelled against Heaven. All the chapters, with the exception of the story of Sanzang’s family, are essential to the whole story and follow no repeated formulae. By far the largest section, Chapters 13 to 97, over five-sixth of the whole book, covers the journey itself. The first ten of these chapters include some episodes essential to the whole in which the lone pilgrim Sanzang acquires his three disciples Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Friar Sand, as well as his white dragon horse. The next seventy-five chapters, the adventures of the four travellers and their horse on their fourteen-year journey, are not one but dozens of stories, all self-contained and running from one to five chapters in length. In each episode the travellers are presented with a problem that they have to deal with before they can continue on their way. Once the problem is solved, as it always is, the place where it happened is left behind and a new episode immediately begins. Apart from the pilgrims themselves and some of their heavenly patrons who put in an occasional appearance, characters virtually never recur after the episode in which they feature. It is unusual for earlier episodes on the journey even to be referred to once they are over. Wukong, Bajie, Friar Sand and the Tang Priest hardly ever talk about them; and while the monsters, kings and other characters met along the way have often heard of the pilgrims’ general reputations and origins, they rarely know anything about Wukong’s deeds along the way.

The third part, which is also the shortest, is only three chapters long. This is enough to deal with the travellers’ arrival at the Thunder Monastery on Vulture Peak in India, their rather shabby treatment there, their return to China, and their final reward. Once the journey to the West is over there is little more to be said. Wukong who has risen above the world’s troubles as a Buddha, Bajie who has lost his greed, are no longer either interesting or attractive. The book is brought to a summary conclusion and that is that.

The structure of the novel is thus something like a pair of book ends, the first twelve and the last three chapters in the present version, between which stand a number of booklets, each of which is a self-contained story or short set of related stories about the same group of pilgrims in a new location every time.

We can see something of how this loose structure developed by comparing the Journey to the West we now have with surviving parts of earlier versions of the story cycle.

The ultimate origin of the tradition was a real journey across central Asia to the Indian subcontinent by a most remarkable man, the Buddhist monk and translator Xuanzang, also known as the Dharma Master Sanzang, who died in 664. Xuanzang was brave and able, coping unaided with the difficulties and dangers of his journey, then becoming so expert in Mahayana Buddhist Pure Ideation theory that he could defeat rivals in public disputations in India. His own account of his travels and the biography of him written by a disciple bear very little relation to the pure fantasy of Journey to the West; and the real Xuanzang was nothing like the helpless idiot in the story who can scarcely take single pace without his disciples. So although Xuanzang’s journey was the starting point of the tradition, that starting point is so remote from the present book as to have very little direct relationship with it. Journey to the West is not a fictionalized version of the actual travels of Xuanzang; but had Xuanzang not made his journey west from Tang China the legends and fantasies that led to the present book would never have developed.

Even before the Tang Dynasty was over the legends that led to Journey to the West had begun to form. Among the many thousands of manuscripts found in a cave at Dunhuang earlier in this century is a tantalizing fragment of the story of how Emperor Taizong of the Tang went down to the underworld that now forms Chapter 11 of the novel.¹ This early version is even less respectful to the Tang monarch than the one we have in the present book. The fragment, dating from the ninth or tenth century, does not touch on any of the main elements in the story cycle as we now know it, and so we cannot take it as proof that the cycle had already begun to develop: the emperor’s trip to the underworld may have been an independent story that was only later tacked on to the main group of stories about Sanzang’s journey.

In Hangzhou in the thirteenth century or thereabouts a book was printed, only two tattered copies of which were preserved in Japan till modern times, that is immediately recognizable as an ancestor of the present Journey to the West: The Tale of How Sanzang of the Great Tang Fetched the Scriptures.² It is far shorter—about a fiftieth of the length of the Journey—and is much simpler. In both plot and detail the Tale differs in all sorts of ways from the vastly richer, more subtle and more mature Journey. But it adds the fantastic Sun Wukong to the historical Tang Priest, and though he is not identical with our Wukong he is evidently the same character in essence: the reformed king of the 84,000 monkeys on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit who has made mischief in heaven in the past and is now putting his magical powers (which are much like our Wukong’s) at the service of Sanzang on his pilgrimage. It is generally accepted that this monkey is closely related to the mischievous monkey king Hanuman of Hindu mythology who led his monkey hordes to help Rama. An earlier version of Friar Sand also appears; of the essential characters only Bajie is lacking.

Compared with the Journey, the Tale lacks most of the opening section—the first group of chapters in the Journey—and devotes quite a lot of its very limited space to the return journey from the West. But in it we can see an early stage of the development of the Journey’s great central section. Already it contains self-contained adventures along the way to India in which Sanzang would be lost were not Wukong there to save him with his magic power and his intelligence.

The next fairly full version of the story that survives is a stage one, probably going back to fourteenth-century performing scripts though it was printed much later. The Drama of the Journey to the West³ is a musical play in twenty-four scenes that starts with four of the disasters that befell Sanzang’s parents and the later retribution. Not till Scene 9 does Wukong appear, rebel againts Heaven, submit to Guanyin. From then on he dominates most but not all of the episodes on the pilgrimage, which ends with Sanzang reaching Vulture Peak in Scene 22. As in our novel, the story is brought rapidly to an end after this. In this playscript white dragon horse, Friar Sand and, more important, Zhu Bajie all appear. Bajie tells us that he was the charioteer of Marici (a Hindu goddess taken over by Buddhism as a bodhisattva) in an earlier life. Although the story of his carrying a wife off to his mountain cave is clearly an earlier version of the story of how he is subdued in Chapter 18 and 19 of the present Journey, he is not yet the marvellously rich character of the Journey, and in the few scenes that follow his submission he has no speaking or singing part. The central relationship in our Journey, that between him and Wukong, has not yet appeared.

We know for certain that there was at least one other written version of the story circulating about this time, The Story of the Journey to the West. An excerpt is quoted in one of the few surviving volumes of an early fifteenth-century compendium, the Yong Le Encyclopaedia. This is an earlier and shorter version of the beheading of the dragon king of the Jing River to be found in Chapter 10 of our Journey. Other excerpts are quoted, summarized or referred to in a manual of lively conversational Chinese published in Korea at about the same time. These include Sun Wukong’s battle of magic with the three Taoist immortals in our Chapters 45 and 46.

From what we can judge of this earlier Story of the Journey to the West it was well on the way to becoming the present novel. We do not know how long it was and we cannot tell how many episodes or chapters it contained. The fragments that survive suggest that it was a lot closer to the present version than were the Tale and the Drama, but that it was far simpler and less elaborated. Clearly the individual episodes were much shorter than they are in the present text; and I am inclined to doubt whether there were as many of them. There were good reasons why the number of episodes along the way should grow and grow as the story developed over the centuries.

We have been looking so far at written versions of the story as it developed from about the thirteenth century onwards. Much of the real development of the story, however, was not on paper but in performances, sometimes on stage but especially by storytellers. In the cities of late mediaeval China drama and storytelling were commercialized: they were show business. Storytellers in Tang times had sometimes been Buddhist monks, using amazing tales that were often drawn or copied from the immensely wealthy storehouses of Indian fantasy to bring their listeners to share their faith. By the Song Dynasty storytelling was primarily a secular trade, though the professionals undoubtedly were influenced by some of the religious parables. The earliest known version of the present story, the Tale of How Sanzang of the Great Tang Fetched the Scriptures, still has a very clear Buddhist message that is put over hard in every chapter. Yet its publisher was from the entertainment quarter of the city of Hangzhou. It is thus at the transition from what is primarily preaching while also being fun, to what is primarily fun but still has more than a touch of religion to it.

Storytellers earning their living in a highly competitive market such as the city of Hangzhou had their work cut out to keep their customers. Their position was not unlike that of a television series competing in an open market with a number of rivals. Different storytellers specialized in telling different kinds of stories, and within their own fields each one had to be predictable enough for the audience to know more or less what kind of thing to expect, while also being original enough within those limits to keep the public interested and wanting to come back for more. Just as television viewers can switch channels, the would-be hearers of stories could always go elsewhere if they did not like what was on offer. And just as television executives like to stay with a series that has a successful formula, arranging for more and more episodes to be written and made until the audiences fall off, so did the storytellers in fourteenth-century Chinese cities enrich and develop the very simple formula of monk plus monkey they had inherited into the vital triangle of monk, monkey, and pig facing a long series of troubles. The chapters in the book were equivalent to performances; new episodes could be freely added. It is during this century that wit comes into the tradition, and the stories become far richer in satire and invention. By the end of the fourteenth century the quintet of Tang Priest, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Friar Sand and the white horse were well enough known to the public for a manufacturer to market a porcelain pillow featuring them all on its design.⁴

Once the successful formula had been found it could be developed. Now that the audience knew and liked the pilgrims it wanted new stories and plays about them as well as the familiar ones return. And as the series became more and more popular in theatres, teahouses and bars, enterprising publishers, not restricted by copyright, brought out printed versions of the stories and plays that enabled the rich to enjoy them in private. There would always have been a demand for new, self-contained episodes. To return to the metaphor used above, as more and more booklets were added, the book-ends were pushed further apart.

Although we cannot be sure when the present novel was written there are reasons for thinking it almost certainly dates from the middle or later decades of the sixteenth century. The style is right for the period, and the theme of a deluded monarch under the influence of devilish Taoist magicians that is found in several episodes of the novel (as in Chapters 37-39, 44-46, and 78-79) would have had a special relevance during or soon after the Jiajing reign of 1522-1567. The Jiajing emperor was a devotee of heterodox Taoist magic, including some of a very unpleasant nature: the story in the book of the king of Bhiksuland who was going to have a thousand little boys murdered so that their hearts could be used to make a potion for him was only to some extent an exaggeration of what was done for the Ming emperor.

It may be that the author of the novel was the Wu Cheng’en to whom it is generally attributed by scholars, but the thin evidence for the attribution fails to establish it beyond reasonable doubt. Wu’s official career took him to Beijing, where he would have learned much about palace politics, and to provincial postings; and the author of the book must have known a little about court life, though he shows scarcely any interest at all in the inner workings of bureaucratic politics. There is nothing about palaces in the book that a fairly well-read commoner could not have known, and one would not have needed inside sources of information to hear the kind of rumours about the court that may lie behind some chapters of the Journey.

Another question about the authorship that is just as important and even harder to answer with confidence is this: how far did the person who wrote down the present version of the story create it, or was he only an editor? We know of some episodes that had been told, performed and published before, but we do not know how many, or how fully. There is no way of telling what other stories about Sanzang, Wukong and the rest of them were being told in the sixteenth century. The book does not read as though it is simply a transcription of performances, however. It seems reasonable to regard it as one man’s reworking of material that had been accumulated, developed and improved by countless professional entertainers over many centuries. Did this final reworking include the invention of whole new episodes? Had the hundred-chapter length and the nine times nine ordeals of the Tang Priest been reached before the present version, or did our author himself stretch the story cycle to its present length? These are questions that cannot yet be answered.

With the exception of Chapter 9 of the present version, a chapter that was in any case not in the original edition of 1592, the style of the book is basically consistent throughout, especially once the journey has begun in Chapter 13. So too are the characters of the four travellers, even when some of the adventures they undergo differ greatly from the normal pattern. The book’s overall structure is casual—the result, as we have seen, of hundreds of years of lengthening the journey by adding new episodes—but the writing is not. Although the individual episodes are not all equally inspired, even the lesser ones are enlivened by the marvellous dialogue, especially the endless banter between Wukong and Bajie, and by the acute observation of human foibles. Whenever we can compare a passage in the present Journey with a related one in a previous version of the story the present version is vastly superior.

Another reason for believing that the author of this version really did a lot to the material he inherited is that once this version of the story was published all earlier version disappeared. All later editions of the story were reprints, adaptions or abridgements of this one; and though it gave rise to sequels it left no room in the market for rivals. Given the absence of copyright and the competitiveness of the Ming book trade, publishers would have been only too willing to bring out other versions of the story had ones as good as this been available. Wu Cheng’en (or whoever else the author was) produced something so superior to any other treatments of the story cycle that he gave it a definitive form. There was no further room or need for improvement.

Journey to the West was thus both a collective creation by professional entertainers who over many hundreds of years developed its stories and characters in response to audience demand and also the work of an individual writer of unusual quality who used the excellent material he inherited to make something even better. The author’s personality never intrudes, but the reader can often feel it there.

Because of the long and complicated process of its creation it is hard to find the right critical approach. We cannot make the sort of demands of it that could be made of a nineteenth century European novel, then blame it for failing to be an integrated whole expressing a clear, individual view of life. The author of Journey to the West could not transcend the form he took as his basis, the storyteller’s tale, but he could make the best possible use of it and adapt it to the printed page.

The storyteller’s tale was the vehicle for a performance that had to hold its audience. A storyteller had no time for long descriptions except as poems or songs to vary the entertainment, keeping the audience in suspense at exciting moments, or commenting on what was happening. The many verse passages in the novel are, I believe, a development of storyteller’s verse. The author uses them as exuberant celebrations of language, piling up words with a gusto that reminds a Western reader of Rabelais’ magnificent accumulations of words. They are not, for the most part, restrained and understated classical poetry, but verbal play, deliberately exaggerated. In the verse everything is taken to extremes, but we always feel that the author has his tongue in his cheek, and that in piling on his effects he is reminding us that it is only a game. He was not trying to write classical poetry and failing, but using popular forms to indulge in a kind of writing that the classical forms would not accomodate. He also took that kind of descriptive verse much further than a storyteller could have done without losing his audience: reading is quicker than hearing.

The narrative method of the Journey is very much the storyteller’s. The storyteller’s performance was one-man or one-woman theatre, with the characters impersonated. Being theatrical, it needed action and dialogue, with a minimum of description or accounts of events that could not be graphically shown to the audience. The storyteller’s tale tends to divide up into clearly defined scenes with the links between them he kept as brief as possible. Groups of scenes go to make up a single session and sometimes up to five sessions can form a miniature serial, which might have been spread over several days. In a book using this form the session is the chapter, and groups of up to five chapters form the self-contained episodes that make up nearly all of the Journey to the West.

Although the novel was written to be read, it deliberately creates the impression of a storyteller’s performance. From time to time the reader is addressed directly and told to wonder at something; at the end of each chapter, or session, we are urged to listen to, not read, the next instalment. Like a storyteller, the author does not tell us directly about his characters’ personalities and motivations, but brings them out through their words and actions. Yet even though we are given the feel a story being told, it is a book most enjoyed when read. One has the choice of reading it through from beginning to end or dipping in and enjoying an episode. Perhaps it is best treated as a serial and taken a few chapters at a time.

One thing the book does not try to do is to persuade the reader very hard that the fantastic adventures really are happening. As its original readers would all have known before they opened the book that the Tang Priest and his disciples were going to complete his journey safely there would have been little point in trying to create great suspense about whether he is going to be eaten by any of the monsterss who capture him along the way. The interest of plot of each episode is not whether Sanzang will be rescued but how Wukong will do it this time.

Monsters doomed to failure cannot be all that frightening, and the author of the Journey does not really attempt to terrify his readers. They are of course wicked. Most of them, especially the ones who live in the mountains or rivers, eat people. The males are particularly eager to eat some of the flesh of the Tang Priest because he is so holy that it will make them live forever; and the female among them want to attain immortality by mating with him. They all have amazing magical powers and most of them look terrifying. And yet apart from the ones in human form who masquerade as Taoist masters, delude kings and persecute their subjects, the monsters are not shown as being personally evil or loathsome. Some are even shown with a certain warmth, and the reader suspects that in some of the portrayals the author is satirizing powerful figures in the human society of his own day. We even feel a little sorry for Raksasi, the Princess Iron Fan who has been abandoned by her husband the Bull Demon King and whose son the Red Boy has been taken from her by the Bodhisattva Guanyin.

One might expect that a long series of adventures in which Wukong has to save either his master or a country from monsters and in which we know he is going to succeed would be of much less interest than in fact they are. Most of the episodes on the journey fall into two categories. The larger category is of episodes in which monsters who live in the wilds, generally mountains and sometimes rivers, capture the Tang Priest and at least one of the disciples, and are eventually subdued. These are the monsters who have to be dealt with if the journey is to continue. The smaller category is of episodes set in cities or other settled, civilized places. Here the danger is usually not to the travellers themselves but to human society, coming generally from misgovernment that results from fiendish influences. The proportion of episodes in the wilds to ones in civilization is about two to one. These standard patterns are varied with unique episodes, such as the subduing of Bajie, the trouble with the manfruit in the Wuzhuang Temple, and the confusion between the true and the false Wukong; and the standard patterns themselves allow plenty of room for ingenious diversification.

When we first get to know Wukong as a monster himself on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit we see him develop powers so tremendous that only the Rulai Buddha can subdue him. After he becomes Sanzang’s disciple he remains a formidable and indestructible fighter capable of amazing magical feats. But his powers have their limits; after all, if he could beat all enemies with a couple of swings of his gold-banded cudgel there would be no story to tell. Although none of the monsters can kill him, he cannot beat the more powerful of them. The help of Bajie and Friar Sand is rarely enough to tip the balance. This brings into play another of his talents that turns out to be at least as important as his strength, speed and power of transformation: his understanding of the ways of the human, the heavenly and the demonic worlds. Wukong’s own fighting prowess makes him all but invincible, but it is his expertise in knowing the right people, and in knowing or finding out what everybody’s background is, that enables him to beat the monsters. With that knowledge, his old prestige as a heaven-smashing rebel and his present status as the Tang Priest’s escort Wukong can get past the underlings who would block anyone else’s access and ask for help from whoever has the power to subdue the monster in question. In the last resort it is not what he can do but who he knows that gives him most power. This is typical of the worldly wisdom and maturity of Journey to the West. Wukong the fixer, never at a loss whether he is dealing with humans, gods or demons, holds our attention and interest long after the novelty of Wukong the fighter with amazing magic arts has worn off. The fantasy is firmly grounded in social reality.

Another way in which the novel is successful by being true to life is in the handling of the main characters. Two of them, Sanzang and Sun Wukong, had been in the earlier versions of the story as far back as it can be traced, as we have seen, and Wukong had always been the dominant one. In order to set him off better, Sanzang became weaker and more useless over the centuries, until by the time the present Journey was written he had become a nincompoop. The only positive thing left about him is his unswerving determination to preserve himself so he can reach his goal and collect the scriptures. Apart from that, he is cowardly, self-pitying, easily deceived, stupid, petty, given to complaining when he is hungry or tired, and grudging in acknowledging Wukong’s abilities and efforts. Wukong, on the other hand, is loyal, selfless to the point of risking the dreaded Band-tightening Spell being recited, unafraid, dauntless, cheerful and tireless, in addition to all the magic powers that make him so outstanding a fighter and a fixer. Wukong’s attitude to his master, in which real royalty is expressed with no respect for Sanzang’s dignity, is utterly free from slavishness. But these two characters are not enough to build a great story on. However richly varied the circumstances of each episode, the relationship between Wukong and his master lacks the depth of, say, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Neither of them is ordinary enough to set the other off.

This gap was filled when Zhu Bajie was brought into the tradition; and though we do not know how much his part in the present novel owes to its author and how much to earlier Ming sources, it is he who provides the ideal foil for Sun Wukong. He is the archetypal man of appetites, greedy, vain, jealous, boastful, and lecherous. Lazy when he can be, he also works hard when he must. Stupid though he is usually, he also knows a trick or two, as when he ties straw on the horse’s hooves before the crossing of a frozen river. He is always the first to want to give up when things are going badly, but he can easily be talked round, just as he will restrain himself from pursuing a woman when reminded of his duty. When the novelist constantly calls him “the idiot” he is not being quite fair: Bajie is not completely stupid. If he were there could be no rivalry between him and Wukong. Bajie is not so much an idiot as an ordinary man.

That rivalry is the central relationship in the book. Bajie envies Wukong’s superior magical and fighting powers, while Wukong resents what he sees as the master’s favouritism towards Bajie. Bajie brings out some aspects of Wukong’s character, such a playful but malicious cruelty, that might otherwise be less noticeable. While Wukong won’t let Bajie die, he is willing to let his junior fellow-disciple suffer all sorts of unpleasantness short of death just in order to get one up on him.

The development of Bajie into being a central figure in the story over the century or two before the present Journey was written also changed Wukong, making him more distinctive. In earlier versions of the tradition Wukong had a wife and chased women, behaving much more like an ordinary monster. Bajie took over that side of the earlier Wukong, leaving Wukong free of appetites to be the pure intellect, the Mind-ape capable of infinite transformations, the potentially destructive and dangerous force that has to be controlled by the golden band round his head. While Wukong embodies the mind, Bajie can represent the body with its appetites. Wukong is never bothered about food—the occasional piece of fruit is enough to keep him going—while Bajie is obsessed with it. Wukong is always trying to find things out, and he moves with the speed of thought; Bajie, though capable of flying, is a plodder who rarely thinks further ahead than the end of his snout. Bajie cares terribly about what people think of him, whereas Wukong does not worry about his prestige or even refer to it except when it will help the cause. Bajie is as essential to the journey as Wukong. Grumble though he may, he will do the heavy jobs such as carrying luggage or clearing the way across Thorn Ridge; and as even Wukong cannot be everywhere at once Bajie can, provided he is kept under control, help guard the master and fight demons.

Wukong and Bajie’s dialogues are one of the greatest joys of the novel. Sometimes very warm, sometimes needling, sometimes getting at each other, sometimes discussing the situation, often joking—their talk is an unending source of pleasure. For many readers they are the heart of the novel; and because they are so true to human nature everywhere they give the book its immortality and universal appeal.

The triangle of Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and their master is the central structure of nearly all the episodes of the journey. This leaves little for Friar Sand to do in carrying the story forward, with the result that he remains a rather shadowy figure throughout. His main contribution to the stories is to be somebody to whom one of the three main characters can talk when the other two are away. One has the impression that he was too firmly established in the tradition to be got rid of, but that neither storyteller nor writer, neither hearer nor reader, found much of interest in him. For this reason he has been retained but the shadows, leaving the limelight to Wukong and Bajie.

The question of what the book’s message really is has been argued about for over three centuries and is never likely to be finally answered because its archetypal symbols can be taken in so many ways. Part of the difficulty in interpreting it arises from the fact that what was originally a preaching story to encourage the general public to accept a rather simple Buddhist faith changed much of its content as it grew over the centuries while preserving the form of a pilgrimage to collect Buddhist scriptures. It is hard to disentangle what is simply time-honoured convention from the author’s own thoughts. The Buddhism of the book is not very rigorous. Titles of sutras and of Buddhas and bodhisattvas are in places wrong; and the Buddhist verses contain the sort of teachings that were commonplace in Ming China, where they were taken for granted in much the same way that Christian values were in Western Europe at the time. The book is Buddhist, but not primarily so, just as much sixteenth-century European literature is Christian without being religious.

There is also a strong element of Taoism in it. Some commentators have argued that this is the book’s main message, and presented it as a guide to finding the Way. It is true that there is much use of commonplace Taoist symbolism, such as the Five Elements that yield to each other. Obscure references are made to achieving the elixir of literal or metaphorical immortality through combining the elements and a long process of self-purification. In sixteenth-century China Taoist chemical and physiological alchemy were much in vogue, so that references to that kind of thinking were almost inevitable: but it is hard to see that it is meant to be taken very seriously. In addition, the hatred that the author left for some Taoist magic is made very clear, particularly when it involved ruining a country by deluding its monarch. Yet Wukong himself acquired his powers through learning Taoist magic. The supernatural world of the novel is one in which Buddhas and Taoist deities co-exist as part of the same heavenly hierarchy. The Jade Emperor and Lord Lao Zi have their spheres of interest, and the Buddhas and bodhisattvas have theirs. Nowhere in the book do they clash. When in the early chapters Wukong is a rebel, he rebels against both, and they combine forces to put him down. Then, as later, the Rulai Buddha is the ultimate authority; but he so holds back from intervening in worldly affairs that only in exceptional circumstances will he use his supreme power.

It seems to me that there is no need to choose between the Buddhist and the Taoist aspects of the book. Wukong advises the king of Tarrycart in Chapter 47:

“I hope that you will combine the three teachings by honouring both the Buddhist clergy and the Way of Taoism, and by also educating men of talent in the Confucian tradition. I can guarantee that this will make your kingdom secure forever.”

We cannot be sure that the author is speaking through Wukong’s voice, but it certainly sounds that way.

Nor is the book a straightforward struggle between good and evil. Wukong himself has some ambiguities about him. In the book’s exhilarating early chapters he is himself a great monster who rebels against Heaven. As he explains to the Tang Priest in Chapter 27, he used to eat people too. Wukong as rebel has been made much of in China in recent decades, and this is understandable. But does that mean that from Chapter 14 onwards he has surrendered? No, I think, in the author’s mind. The book does not end with the defeat of Wukong’s rebellion: it is only the beginning of the story. An overall interpretation of Wukong has to give more weight to eighty-seven chapters than to seven, and treat the seven as a prologue to the rest. In the eighty-seven chapters Wukong’s destructiveness and wildness are held under control, both by his loyalty to his master and by the threat of excruciating headaches. But he does not lose his spirit. Wukong’s loyalty does not extend to toadying, whether to his master or to anyone else. In his frank speaking and impatience with protocol, hypocrisy, pomposity and tyrannical government he is the same Wukong as before.

For Wukong the obstacles along the way are just that: obstacles to be dealt with. Only the ogres in human form who bring misery to human society are seen as really evil to be eliminated for their own sake. Most of the monsters in the wilds along the way are themselves escaped heavenly creatures, whose masters and mistresses take them back and protect them from Wukong’s avenging cudgel. All that matters is that they stop hindering the travellers. Whether Wukong and Bajie exterminate them or not is not really important.

It is sensible, I think, to take the books’s symbolism and message in as broad a sense as possible. There are besides a number of hints that the highest teaching is wordless. The quest could be any quest, any long and difficult undertaking in which patience, ingenuity and courage, together with an excellent understanding of the ways of the world, are essential for success. The form happens to be a journey to fetch Buddhist scriptures, and it can be taken as what it appears to be if one wishes. Like all the best symbolism, it is very adaptable.

Whatever the message may be, the best thing is not to worry about it, but simply to enjoy the book’s wisdom, humour and endlessly rich observation and invention. If the reader can get some of the pleasure from Journey to the West that I have had in translating it the effort will not have been wasted.

—W.J.F. Jenner
September 1984

1. This is translated by Arthur Waley in his Ballads and Stories from Tun-huang.

2. 大唐三藏取經詩話.

3. 西遊記雜劇.

4. Now in the Guangzhou Museum.