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

  1. The title Xiyouji listed in the Huai’an Gazetteer cannot be positively identified with the hundred-chapter narrative.

  2. There is no known precedent in Chinese literary history for equating anecdotal records (zaji) with works of fiction.

  3. Wu Cheng’en’s reputed excellence in humorous compositions is not positive evidence of authorship.

  4. None of the known persons associated with the first publication of the hundred-chapter version had any idea who the author was.

  5. The famous iconoclast and literary critic Li Zhi (styled, Zhuowu 1527–1602), credited with having edited such major works of literature as the Shuihuzhuan, the Xixiangji, and possibly the Xiyouji with a full-blown commentary attached, made no mention of Wu Cheng’en’s authorship even in that last work (which is disputed).78

  The last of Tanaka’s five reasons for doubting the authorship of Wu Cheng’en is ostensibly the most cogent, since Li’s alleged activities relative to his editing of The Journey to the West could not have occurred more than twenty years after Wu’s death. If Wu’s fame was as widespread as the Huai’an Gazetteer had claimed, why did Li seem to be completely ignorant of it, especially when his annotations of the narrative in many places clearly reflect his admiration for its anonymous author?79

  There can be more than one answer to this question. Tanaka’s inference—that silence is ignorance, and that Li’s ignorance further casts doubt on Wu’s putative achievements—is only one among several possibilities. It is merely an argument ex silentio, for Li at no point made the specific assertion that Wu was not the author. Moreover, if Wu Cheng’en was known to be fond of befriending some of the Seven Masters of Later Times80—the group of literary theorists and writers of late Ming who championed the imitation of the classics—one wonders if Li Zhi would be inclined to suspect Wu’s hand in XYJ, or, even if he had known Wu to be the author, to credit him publicly with the authorship. Li himself, we must remember, was the declared foe and staunch critic of this literary movement, and his own imprisonment and eventual suicide were caused in no small way by his stubborn iconoclasm in views both political and literary.81 On the other hand, the fact that Li was indeed silent should caution the critic from too hasty an acceptance of Wu’s authorship.

  The authenticity of the commentarial remarks in this edition attributed to Li Zhi, in fact, has been questioned repeatedly, and most scholars today retain the skepticism already voiced in the Qing. Nonetheless, the importance of the remarks themselves, usually appearing in “end-of-chapter overall commentary ,” ought not again to be dismissed easily, because their content—consistently sardonic and witty enough to recall aspects of Li’s rhetoric and style—hardly hews to the line of later criticism that tends to exalt either Neo-Confucianism or Quanzhen Daoism, a conscientiously syncretistic blend of Chan Buddhist and Daoist ideas advocated by the lineage. Without thoroughly studying the Li edition, comparing it with his other fictional and dramatic commentaries along with later Ming-Qing editions of XYJ, the issue of authenticity cannot be settled.

  With regard to the reputation of Wu Cheng’en as a humorist, it is certainly true that that characteristic alone cannot establish Wu as the author. Nor, of course, should this trait be ignored, since the narrative is rich comedy and satire. Another equally significant aspect of Wu’s character which may link him to The Journey to the West is his self-declared predilection for the marvelous, the exotic, and the supramundane in literature. In the Yudingzhi xu , a preface to a group of stories, now lost, which he wrote on one of the legendary sage kings of Chinese antiquity, Wu said:

  I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish me for this and rob me of these treasures, I carefully hid them in secret places where I could enjoy them unmolested. As I grew older, my love for strange stories became even stronger, and I learned of things stranger than what I had read in my childhood. When I was in my thirties, my memory was full of these stories accumulated through years of eager seeking. I have always admired such writers of the Tang Dynasty as Tuan Ch’êng-shih [Duan Chengshi , author of the Youyang zazu ] and Niu Sheng-ju [Niu Sengru , author of the Xuanguai lu ], who wrote short stories so excellent in portrayal of men and description of things. I often had the ambition to write a book (of stories) which might be compared with theirs. But I was too lazy to write, and as my laziness persisted, I gradually forgot most of the stories which I had learned. Now only these few stories, less than a score, have survived and have so successfully battled against my laziness that they are at last written down. Hence this Book of Monsters. I have sometimes laughingly said to myself that it is not I who have found these ghosts and monsters, but they, the monstrosities themselves, which have found me! . . . Although my book is called a book of monsters [literally, zhiguai ], it is not devoted to provide illumination for ghosts: it also records the strange things of the human world and sometimes conveys a little bit of moral lesson.82

  That the author of the hundred-chapter novel could have been familiar with the contents of the Youyang zazu may be seen from the references to the Three Worms in chapter 15 and Wu Gang in chapter 22. The book thus mentioned, however, is more than simply an anthology of fabulous tales of the ninth-century Tang era. Duan Chengshi (c. 800–863), in the words of the late Edward H. Schafer, an authority on Tang manifold culture both native and imported, was a “bibliophile, word-fancier, and collector of curiosa,” and the book Duan compiled and wrote

  collected data on every subject, especially information that was outside the realm of common knowledge—such as the use of wooden traps to catch elephants in some foreign land, knowledge that he picked up from a Cantonese physician who had it from a foreign ship captain. Indeed, he sought new knowledge far outside the walls of his library and was noted for his rather scandalous consorting with vagabonds, maid-servants, and foreigners, and even counted “Romans” (Anatolians? Syrians?) and Indians among his informants. Much of the data he collected in this way was linguistic, and it would not be an exaggeration to characterize him as a pioneering field linguist. He also reported on foreign scripts and book-styles; he knew imported incenses and perfumes, such as gum guggul, ambergris, and balm of Gilead—as well as their commercial names in exotic languages—and the names and characteristics of foreign medicinal herbs and garden flowers. He collected reports on the unseen or supernal worlds from persons who claimed expert knowledge of such places; . . . But he was no mere recorder: he often voices his own doubts about the reliability of reports he has received and sometimes goes to considerable pains to check their accuracy with supposed witnesses. For this and other reasons the Yu-yang tsa-tsu is no mere mindless collectanea—it has very much the personal stamp of its author, an open-minded book-lover not bound by books.83

  Schafer’s meticulous description of the Tang anthology ironically casts further doubt on Wu’s authorship of XYJ, for not many of the elements mentioned, or even allusions to or verbal echoes of them, have turned up in XYJ. The novel itself does not bear up Wu’s professed fondness for Duan’s title. The near-century-long debate on the authorship of this Chinese masterpiece has yet to resolve this fundamental problem. Given the magnitude, length, and complexity of the hundred-chapter novel, thorough examination and analysis of what might have been the materials alluded to and, even more important, made use of by the actual text itself become the indispensable task of any serious interpreter of a literary document like XYJ. The nature and sources (to the extent that they are discoverable) of the document’s language and rhetoric provide the nonnegotiable basis for a considered judgment on what that document is about. The results of such labor should then be compared and correlated with the characteristics and discernible features of any known writings of a person nominated for putative authorship. How this fundamental problem has been treated in the history of XYJ’s reception, however, clearly reveals the difference dividing premodern readers
and the early twentieth-century scholars like Hu Shi and Lu Xun. Whereas the Qing readers were fascinated by much of the content and allegorical rhetoric of the novel’s text, the modern scholars seemed far more eager to find a person as the likely authorial candidate. Before the end of this section of this introduction, therefore, it is necessary to take up briefly the novel’s reception by two of its premodern readers (the second one admittedly putative and controversial) before one can entertain the question (in the last two parts of the introduction) of whether the novel’s aim and message coincide with Wu Cheng’en’s description of his now lost book of stories written to record “the strange things of the human world and sometimes and . . . a little bit of moral lesson.”

  The earliest moral lesson that has surfaced in XYJ, as far as the readers are concerned, has to be that articulated in the preface of the Shidetang edition by one Chen Yuanzhi. According to him,

  We do not know who wrote the book, Journey to the West. Some claimed that it originated from the domain of a prince’s household; others, from the likes of the “Eight Squires ()”;84 still others, that a prince himself created it. When I look at its meaning, it appears to be a champion of reckless humor, a composition of overflowing chatter. There used to be a preface [? ],85 but it did not record the name of its author. Could it be on account of the possible offense caused by such vulgar language? Its narration takes up monkey, a monkey that is taken to be the spirit of the heart-and-mind (). The horse: the horse is taken to be the galloping of the will (). The name Bajie: eight is the number of things prohibited, so that it can be taken as the wood phase of the liver’s pneumatic energy (). Sand: flowing sand, that is to be taken as the water phase of the kidney’s pneumatic energy (). As for Tripitaka [Sanzang , originally the Buddhist nomenclature for the triple canon and also an honorary title conferred on the scripture pilgrim of both history and this novel], it refers to the three storages that hoard viscerally (using [articulated as cang when used as a verb] to pun on simultaneously zang , treasury, storehouse, and , the viscera) the spirit, the sound, and the pneumatic energy that [would enable one to become] the lord of a citadel (). Demons: demons are taken as the barriers (zhang , Skt., māra) of the mouth, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, the will, the fears, the contradictions, and the fantasies. That is the reason why demons are born of the mind, and they are also subdued by the mind. That is the reason for subduing the mind in order to subdue demons, and for subduing demons to return to principle. Returning to principle is to revert back to the primal beginning (), which is the mind without anything more to be subdued. This indeed is how the Dao is accomplished and plainly allegorized in this book ()!86

  This passage (of only a few sentences in the original Chinese) conveys what sort of impression the reading of the novelistic text had made on this author of a preface written for the earliest known edition of the hundred-chapter novel. The esoteric terminologies coming into view are first of all consistent with a communal milieu for the formation of a text like XYJ, if the “eight squires” indeed allude to some group like the one mentioned by Ge Hong and King Huainan. The latter himself, as we have pointed out in note 84, was no stranger to cultic ritualists or their writings and practices. In addition, Chen Yuanzhi ends the section not merely with a blunt use of the term “allegory,” but also provides unmistakable clues as to what sort of an allegory the book purports to have fashioned by noting some of its constitutive diction and themes.

  The five pilgrims as the novel’s central figures, for example, are transformed in Chen’s reading at once into multiple metaphors: not only the monkey and the horse are already identified as “The Monkey of the Mind and the Horse of the Will ,” a pair of figurative terms that populate countless texts of both Buddhism and Daoism, but also the delinquent Pig, given the religious nickname Bajie [Eight Rules or Prohibitions] at his conversion in the novel, is furthered troped as “the wood phase of the liver’s pneumatic energy.” Chen’s interpretation, in fact, highlights the chain of metaphoric correlation of bodily or somatic features and ingredients with cosmological processes (e.g., wood and water, two of the Five Phases or wuxing ) pervading the universe and microcosmically the whole of the human body. As will be shown in further detail in part IV of this introduction, such a use of correlation specifically invokes and validates the language and technique of physiological or internal alchemy (neidan ) advocated and practiced by many of the Quanzhen adepts. The allusion to the mental genesis of “demons ” and their “subduing or suppression ” also by the mind (xin) replicates the doctrinal emphasis of Chan Buddhism and its adaptation by Quanzhen discourse that, in line with the tenets of Daoist writings at large, envisages gods and demons residing in one’s body. The third point about Chen’s preface, moreover, directly anticipates Wu Yujin’s observation cited earlier, for both pieces of writing mutually strengthen the novel’s essential linkage to Quanzhen Daoism by referring to a preface attributed to Yu Ji, a document unique to the 1662 edition of the novel titled Xiyou zhengdaoshu that also identifies the Yuan Daoist and alchemist Qiu Chuji, alias (style or hao) Changchun Zhenren, as the XYJ’s author. Qiu, after all, was the second disciple of Wang Chongyang, the founding patriarch of the Quanzhen Order.

  Yu Ji of this second preface of the novel, printed some seventy years later than the known first edition, was an erudite scholar flourishing in 1272–1348. His composition claims that he was given the manuscript by the Daoist Purple Jade , who further claimed that it was written by the Perfected Lord Qiu Changchun . Upon reading it, says Yu,

  I saw that what the book records are the events of acquiring scriptures by Xuanzang, the Tang Master of the Law. Now scripture acquisition did not begin in the Tang, for it existed since the eras of the Han to the Liang, but the activities by Xuanzang of the Tang were the most illustrious. His endurance of a long and dangerous journey and his experiences of immense difficulty, thoroughly recounted in Emperor Taizong’s “Preface to the Holy Religion,” require no further rehearsal by posterity. As I personally perceive the Perfected Lord’s purpose, what is said may regard Xuanzang, but its meaning does not concern Xuanzang. Scripture acquisition is recorded, but the intent is actually not about acquiring scripture, for [that event] is borrowed only to indicate or symbolize (yu ) the Great Way (da Dao ). Monkey, horse, metal, and wood are the yin-yang aspects of our body; ghost, goblin, monster, and demon are also the demonic hindrances (mozhang ) of our human life. Although the book is exceedingly strange, expending undoubtedly several hundred thousand words [an astonishingly accurate word count], but its general importance may be stated in one sentence: it is only about the retrieving or releasing one’s mind (). For whether we folks act like demons and become Buddha are all dependent on this mind. Released, this mind becomes the erroneous mind. When the erroneous mind is aroused, it can become so demonic that there is no place that its movement and transformation cannot reach. An example of this is when the Mind Monkey calls himself a king, a sage, to disturb greatly the Celestial Palace. When this mind is retrieved, it will be the true mind, and once the true mind appears, it can extinguish demons. Similarly, there is no place that its movement and transformation cannot reach. An example of this is when the Mind Monkey subdue[s] monsters and bind[s] fiends so as to illumine the Buddha’s fruit.87

  As can be seen readily from the citation, Yu’s reading of the novel plainly complements the emphasis of Chen Yuanzhi. The thrust of the entire novel, according to Yu, is about the control and liberation of the mind, an interpretation that accords with Chan Buddhism—especially its so-called Southern Lineage ()—and the entire Quanzhen tradition from its founding patriarchs of the Song-Yuan era to the Qing and present-day communities. Despite the putative author’s scholarly reputation, Yu Ji’s preface is controversial, as the novel’s critics past and present have severe doubts about its authenticity. They ask why it did not turn up until seven decades later in a Qing printed edition of the novel. Many surmise that it might have been a forged document inserted into the Qing edi
tion. If the authorship of the preface is questionable, Yu’s account of how he learned of the Quanzhen patriarch Qiu Chuji as the author of XYJ is thus also suspect.

  On the other hand, the historical Yu Ji was active in the Daoist communities of his time, counting among his friends quite a few members of the major lineages of Daoism (Quanzhen, Zhengyi, Maoshan, and Zhendadao Jiao). As Liu Ts’un-yan has shown, Yu Ji also wrote a discerning and knowledgeable preface to a group of miscellaneous writings (some prose, poems, and ritual texts) titled Minghe yuyin (The crying crane’s lingering sounds) now preserved in DZ 744–45. The collection actually was compiled by an itinerant Daoist named Peng Zhizhong , but one section in the collection details Yu Ji’s friendship and happy exchanges of poems with one Feng Zunshi (Honored Master Feng), about whose activities Yu wrote the preface.88

  Yu Ji’s allegation of the Yuan Daoist Qiu Chuji as the original author of XYJ has met also stiff resistance. What complicates matters is the fact that, as noted previously, the Qing scholar Wu Yujin in “The Supplement to the Shanyang Gazetteer” has also credited Qiu with a book of exactly the same name of Xiyouji, or literally in its full form, The Record of the Westward Journey by the Perfected Man of Enduring Spring, Changchun zhenren Xiyouji . This book, however, is no help at all to solve the mystery of the novel’s origin, since readers will discover at once that it concerns topics of travel and geography. With a preface that addresses Qiu as “Father Teacher, fushi ,” the book actually narrates at one point the circumstance of Qiu’s death. For these reasons, most scholars firmly regard the book’s author as likely one of Qiu’s principal disciples, Li Zhichang , who purported to record Qiu’s lengthy and arduous journey in 1221–1224 from Beijing to Genghis Khan’s court in Karakorum in the Mongol heartland. Past seventy years old then, Qiu led some eighteen of his disciples on this visit.89 Despite the different nature of this XYJ, as Andrew Plaks points out, there is one other reference found in Qiu’s corpora that attributes to the patriarch one more work by the same name so as to “reveal the true scriptures in the Western Heaven , , .”90 As any reader of Qiu’s gathered religious writings in both prose and poetry will readily testify, all of his writings are about the ritual precepts and practices of Quanzhen Daoism. In sum, Qiu’s association with the novel XYJ as we know it in the Shidetang version, precisely because of the novelistic use of identifiable rhetoric and terminologies from religious sources, cannot be dismissed out of hand.