The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1 Read online

  That form was finally established by the dramatic versions of the story, of which fortunately we possess at least one more or less complete sample among the six known stage works supposedly devoted to the XYJ theme. This is the twenty-four-scene zaju titled Xiyouji , which was discovered in Japan and first reprinted there in 1927–1928.58 The play was initially thought to be the lost work of the same title by the Yuan playwright, Wu Changling . The ascription, however, has been conclusively repudiated by Sun Kaidi, though Sun’s own thesis that the play was written by Yang Jingxian (alternatively Jingyan ) has been challenged also.59 Whoever the author was, the play is of crucial importance, not only because of its unique length when compared with other dramas of the genre, but also because of its content. It represents the fullest embodiment of the major themes and figures of the XYJ story prior to the hundred-chapter novel.

  Acts 1–4 present at length the adventures of Xuanzang’s parents as well as the abandonment and rescue of the young priest and his revenge of his father’s murderers. Subsequent acts dramatize the royal commission of Xuanzang to procure scriptures, the provision of a dragon-horse and guardian deities by Guanyin for the scripture pilgrim, the mischievous adventures of the monkey hero Sun Xingzhe, and his subsequent submission to Tripitaka as the monk’s disciple and protector. The figure Zhu Bajie is also given extensive coverage (acts 13–16). In this regard, the play is unique not only because Naṭa and not Erlang subdues the monkey (unlike the case of the other Qitian dasheng plays), but also because Erlang has to capture Zhu Bajie who, in Zhu’s own words, fears no one except the deity’s small hound. Readers of the hundred-chapter XYJ will readily recognize these themes when they reappear in the transformed context of the developed narrative. In the case of Sun and Zhu’s relations to the divine figures, they may also perceive how the genius of the late Ming author has adapted his “source” to the logic of his massive masterpiece.

  II TEXT AND AUTHORSHIP

  If the antecedents to the sixteenth-century narrative are numerous and complex, the vast family of texts and the different versions of The Journey to the West itself, both abridged and unabridged, and the controversial puzzle of who might have been the author or final redactor of the 1592 publication present no less formidable areas of investigation to the serious student of this work. We are fortunate once again to have the scholarship of Glen Dudbridge,60 whose earlier informative examinations of the narrative’s textual history and related issues will be supplemented by more recent discussions.

  The principal part of the critical controversy surrounding the genesis of The Journey to the West as a developed novel has to do with the relation of the hundred-chapter version to two shorter versions. One of these is the Sanzang chushen quanzhuan (The Complete Account of Sanzang’s Career), commonly known as the Yang version because its putative author is Yang Zhihe , probably a contemporary of many Fujian publishers at the end of the sixteenth century but about whom little additional information is available. The work, preserved at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and dated by Dudbridge to no later than 1633, may well be the earliest copy. Its forty “chapter-like units”61 came together with the Dongyouji (Journey to the East), the Nanyouji (Journey to the South), and the Beiyouji (Journey to the North), three tales of comparable length which recount the directional voyages of various figures in myth and legend. This group became familiar in a later Qing printing known as the Siyouji zhuan (The Recorded Accounts of The Four Journeys) or Siyou quanzhuan . Though the earliest extant reprint dates from 1730, its printing format points back to a date almost a century earlier.

  The other brief version of the Xiyouji is titled the Tang Sanzang Xiyou shini (=e) zhuan (=) (The Chronicle of Deliverances in Tripitaka Tang’s Journey to the West), commonly known as the Zhu version after its compiler, Zhu Dingchen of Canton. The extant version similar in length to the Yang version is preserved in Taiwan, Japan, and the Library of Congress, but all three copies lack title page and table of contents. The best guess places publication at about 1595 or slightly later.62 The Zhu text has a distinctive long chapter on the “Chen Guangrui story,” which tells of Xuanzang’s birth (he was sent to his mother as a prenatal gift by one or another celestial deities) and early adventures linked to the catastrophes that befall his parents. Abandoned at birth by an abducted and then widowed mother, the infant drifted on a river until a Buddhist monk rescued him. Upon reaching adulthood, Xuanzang avenged his father’s murder and his mother’s disgrace at the hands of a pirate. That story, modified, appears also as chapter 9 first in an abridged Qing edition of the XYJ bearing the name of Xiyou zhengdao shu (A Book for the Illumination of Dao by the Westward Journey), compiled by Huang Taihong and Wang Xiangxu and dated by Dudbridge to around 1662.63 The chapter, however, is missing in the earliest full-length version published in 1592, exactly seven decades earlier, by the Nanjing publishing house named Shidetang (The Hall of Generational Virtue) and in several other editions almost immediately following which are based on this text.64 Since the title of the Zhu text is also explicitly named in the heptasyllabic regulated poem which opens the hundred-chapter novel (see the present translation’s chapter 1, where I have rendered its last line as: “Read The Tale of Woes Dispelled on Journey West”), the critical controversy centers on which version is the earliest.

  Though scholars in the past have advocated the temporal priority of either the Yang or the Zhu version, Dudbridge seems to me to have clearly established the supremacy of the 1592 Shidetang text which, in his judgment, “promises to stand as close to the original as any that survives.”65 Four decades after this declaration that in itself also already possessed another four decades of antecedent disputation, we have little new data or compelling interpretation that would significantly modify, let alone overturn, his verdict. The debate over textual priority, in the words of Andrew Plaks, had “seesawed back and forth,”66 going through all three such possible options as (1) 1592, Zhu version, Yang version; (2) Zhu version, Yang version, 1592; and (3) Yang version, 1592, and Zhu version, but no combination has won consensus as the best. Perhaps it should be remarked, parenthetically, that for the Chinese tradition, textual criticism is also a venerable practice that harks back to high antiquity. Generally, however, there are no criteria on which Chinese critics agree for determining what linguistic phenomena are verifiable signs of changes that amount to deliberate abbreviation, abridgment, or expansion.

  Texts as late as vernacular Chinese fiction require attention to a new set of social and material issues. Thus even the valuable work done by the late Liu Ts’un-yan, Zheng Mingli, Li Shiren, and others reveals a predilection to construe from word usages or modifications (abbreviation or lengthening of syntax, reduction, addition, or change of vocabulary, correction, or corruption of accepted prosodic convention) what passes as sufficient evidence of self-conscious abridgment or fullness of expression. They seldom consider targeted readership and its reading habits, competence in literacy assumed for publishers, printers, and even typesetters, and market conditions of both publishing houses and consumers correlated with time and urban conditions of production. That is why they often assume that a text is entirely the product of a single creative intelligence. More recent scholarship in textual criticism and in the sociology of print culture in China and Europe, however, has steadily advanced the view that a published text is formed by competing social forces and processes, even if a single author was responsible for its genesis.67 A work like The Journey to the West astounds and delights through its bountiful perfection as a finished novel, but the analysis of its formative history and intertextual lineage, fragments and citations from many sources, and commentarial insertions created or appropriated for direct structuring into the novel will add to our wonderment at the diverse and even conflicting features thus embodied. The novel, in sum, represents a complex discursive heterology not disposed to easy assimilation or classification.

  After the People’s Republic of China was founded, the first standard modern critical edition,
on which the present translation is based, was published by Beijing’s Zuojia chubanshe in 1954, using the 1592 edition as a primary “basic ” text, with minor but requisite corrections, clarifications, and collations established by comparison with six other abridged and unabridged editions of The Journey to the West brought out in the Qing period.68 When compared with its numerous literary antecedents, the 1592 hundred-chapter novel may be seen at once as a culmination of a long and many-faceted tradition as well as a creative synthesis and expansion of all the major figures and themes associated with the story of Xuanzang’s westward journey. Though the narrative far surpasses any of the previous dramatic or narrative accounts in scope and length, the author/redactor also reveals a remarkably firm sense of structure and an extraordinary capacity for organizing disparate materials in the presentation of his massive tale. Certain details related to the development of plot and characters evince thoughtful planning, preparation, and execution. The basic outline of the narrative, as we have it in the modern edition, may be divided into the following five sections:

  1. (Chapters 1–7): The birth of Sun Wukong, his acquisition of immortality and magic powers under the tutelage of Patriarch Subhodi, his invasion and disturbance of Heaven, and his final subjugation by Buddha under the Mountain of Five Phases. Despite the elements of supernatural fantasy and magic crowding all the episodes of the segment, the note sounded in the narrated experience emphasizes consistently how the monkey figure is acquiring “the way of the human being.”

  2. (Chapter 8): The Heavenly Council in which Buddha declares his intention to impart the Buddhist canon to the Chinese, the journey of Guanyin to the land of the East to find the appropriate scripture pilgrim, and her encounters with all of Xuanzang’s future disciples foreshadowing the lengthy pilgrimage in reverse direction.

  3. (Chapters 9–12): The background and birth of Xuanzang, his vengeance of his father’s murderers, Wei Zheng’s execution of the Jing River Dragon, the journey of Tang Taizong to the underworld, his convening of the Mass for the Dead, and the epiphany of Guanyin leading to the commission of Xuanzang as the scripture pilgrim.

  4. (Chapters 13–97): The journey itself, developed primarily through a long series of captures and releases of the pilgrims by monsters, demons, animal spirits, and gods in disguise which form the bulk of the eighty-one ordeals (nan ) preordained for the human pilgrim, Xuanzang.

  5. (Chapters 98–100): The successful completion of the journey, the audience with Buddha, the return with scriptures to Chang’an for an audience with the Tang emperor Taizong, and the pilgrims’ final canonization by Buddha in the Western Paradise.

  This book completely translates the modern edition of 1954, a collated text and not a pristine duplication of the 1592 edition. Therefore, I have not followed Dudbridge’s advice or the editorial practice of some of the more recent critical Chinese editions to exclude chapter 9. For reasons stated elsewhere, I am persuaded that the “Chen Guangrui story” is essential to the plot of the Xiyouji as a whole, even though it was not part of the hundred-chapter novel’s earliest known version.69

  Despite the popularity which this narrative has apparently enjoyed since its publication, the identity of its author, as in the case of such other major works of Chinese fiction as the Jinpingmei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Fengshen yanyi, remains unclear. In his preface to the Shidetang edition, Chen Yuanzhi emphasized that neither he, nor the Huayang Dongtian Zhuren (Master of the Huanyang Grotto-Heaven) who checked this edition, nor Tang Guanglu ,70 the publisher who “requested the preface” from Chen, knew who the author was. Indeed, all the known individuals who had anything to do with published editions of The Journey to the West in the Ming dynasty were silent on this point. Several writers in the Qing period, however, had already suggested that Wu Cheng’en (ca. 1500–1582) created the narrative. But it was not until after the essay of 1923 by Hu Shi that scholars widely accepted this theory. Wu, a native of the Shanyang district in the prefecture of Huai’an (the modern Jiangsu ), was never more than a minor official during his lifetime, having been selected as a Tribute Student in 1544, and achieved a certain reputation as a poet and humorous writer. Modern studies of Wu include an edition of his collected writings and a thorough reconstruction of his life and career.71

  The ascription of The Journey to the West to Wu is based primarily on an entry in the Yiwenzhi (Bibliography of Books and Documents) section of the Gazetteer of Huai’an Prefecture , compiled in the Ming Tianqi reign period (1621–27), whereafter Wu’s name are listed the following works:

  Sheyangji , 4 ce ,———juan ; preface to Chunqiu liezhuan ; Xiyouji .72

  An additional reference may be found in the Qianqingtang shumu , a private Catalogue of the Thousand-Acre Hall completed at the end of the seventeenth century,73 in which the title Xiyouji is again printed after the name of Wu Cheng’en. The entry, however, is included within the section on “Geography” (), in the division of “Histories” ().

  Further listings noted by Hu Shi include the Huai’an Gazetteer and the Shanyang District Gazetteer , compiled during the Kangxi (1662–1722) and Tongzhi (1862–74) reigns of the Qing.74 Of the several writers in this dynasty who affirmed Wu to be the author of the Xiyouji, the two most frequently cited are Wu Yujin (1698–1773) and Ding Yan (1794–1875), a noted textual scholar of the classics. In the Shanyang zhiyi (Supplement to the Shanyang Gazetteer), Wu Yujin has the following observation that merits a full quotation:

  The Old Gazetteer of the Tianqi [1621–27] period listed the Master [i.e., Wu Cheng’en] as the ranking writer of recent years whose works had been collected. He was said to be “a man of exceptional intelligence and many talents who read most widely; able to compose poetry and prose at a stroke of the brush, he also excelled in humor and satire . The several kinds of anecdotal records (zaji ) he produced brought him resounding fame at the time.” I did not know at first what sort of books the anecdotal records were until I read the Huaixian wenmu (Catalog of Writings by Huai Regional Worthies [i.e., j 19, 3 b]), where it was recorded that Xiyouji was authored by the Master. I have discovered that Xiyouji, the old title of which was The Book for the Illumination of Dao, is so named because its content was thought to be consonant with the Great Principle of the Golden Elixir . Yu Daoyuan [i.e., Yu Ji , 1272–1348] of the Yuan dynasty had written a preface, in which he claimed that this book was written by the Changchun Daoist Adept with the surname of Qiu [i.e., Qiu Chuji , 1148–1227] at the beginning of the Yuan period. The regional gazetteer, however, claims that it was by the hand of the Master. Since the Tianqi period is not far removed from the time of the Master [Wu Cheng’en died ca. 1582 and the Tianqi reign began in 1621], that statement must have had some basis . It might have meant to indicate that Changchun first composed this account , and when it reached the Master later, he made it into a work of popular fiction (literally, a popular exposition of a [different or fictive] meaning) , much as The Records of the Three Kingdoms had originated from Chen Shou (d. 297), but the fiction (yanyi ) goes by the name of Luo Guanzhong (1315/18–1400?) to whom the Ming novel (oldest complete printed edition dating to 1522) was attributed.75 The fact that the book [i.e., XYJ] contains a great number of expressions peculiar to our local dialects should undoubtedly render it a product of someone from the Huai district.76

  All the points made in this passage by Wu, living a century later than the full-length novel’s first publication, are still topics of debate today. They include: descriptions of the putative author’s gifts and witty predilections; attributed authorship to Wu Cheng’en of a work titled XYJ; Wu Yujin’s professed familiarity with the Qing edition of Xiyou zhengdao shu containing the Yuan scholar Yu Ji’s preface to XYJ and its asserted linkage with the religious ideas of the Yuan Quanzhen Patriarch, Qiu Chuji; the suggested use of the Records of The Three Kingdoms as the source in relation to Luo Guanzhong’s later novel as an analogy for positing an earlier version of the XYJ authored by Qiu Chuji that eventually became in Wu Cheng’en�
��s hands the hundred-chapter work of 1592; and the abundance of local idioms and diction of the Huai region found in the novel. Not one of these topics has been settled.

  Take the criterion of the use of local idioms and dialects, for example. Although the novel’s annotations of each critical edition subsequent to the 1954 version have benefited from further research and clarification, such editorial labor has also made clear that the range of vernacular features exceeds that defined by the Huai’an area alone.77 Even if only the idioms of a single region were deployed consistently, that itself again cannot assume the illogical inference that the author or redactor had to be also someone from that region. The abundance of Shandong linguistic features in texts like Outlaws from the Marshes or Plum in the Golden Vase cannot of itself prove that a Shandongese wrote it any more than the excellence of the prose in Under Western Eyes would furnish conclusive proof that Joseph Conrad was a native writer of English.

  Since the appearance of Hu Shi’s essay, Wu Cheng’en’s authorship has been widely accepted by scholars everywhere. This thesis was challenged by Glen Dudbridge, who in turn followed the arguments advanced by Tanaka Iwao. Essentially, the objection of Tanaka includes the additional following points: