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

  The poems are equally effective in transcribing for us the sense of time passing, the ever recurring pattern of seasonal change.105 Though the length of Tripitaka’s journey in the narrative has been purposefully changed by its author from the historical Xuanzang’s nearly seventeen years to fourteen, the aim is not to minimize the arduous duration of Tripitaka’s undertaking. On the contrary, many details are present in the narrative to emphasize the temporal span of the journey. Not only do the pilgrims themselves repeatedly talk about distance and time (cf. XYJ, chapter 24, p. 270; chapter 80, p. 911; chapter 86, pp. 986–87; chapter 88, p. 1000; chapter 91, p. 1029; chapter 92, p. 1039; chapter 93, p. 1055), but the narrator also stresses the vast span of the pilgrimage by means of frequent poetic descriptions of seasonal alterations. Soon after Sun Wukong’s submission to the scripture pilgrim, the narrative in chapter 14 reads:

  Tripitaka rode his horse, with Pilgrim [i.e., Wukong] leading the way; they journeyed by day and rested by night, taking food and drink according to their needs. Soon it was early winter. You see

  Frost blighted maples and the wizened trees;

  Few verdant pine and cypress still on the ridge. [see 1: 313].

  In chapter 18, however, this is the contrasting scene we have after Sun Wukong has recovered a lost cassock.

  As Pilgrim led the way forward, it was the happiest time of spring. You see

  The horse making light tracks on grassy turfs;

  Gold threads of willow swaying with fresh dew. [see 1: 368].

  These and similar poetic passages (cf. XYJ, chapter 20, p. 223; chapter 23, p. 256; chapter 56, pp. 643–44) are not intended merely for conveying to us the sense and beauty of seasonal change. More important, such accounts of the seasons, in themselves no more than familiar literary exercises in the Chinese lyric tradition, are designed to help the readers grasp the effects on those who must take time to reach a distant goal. Constantly exposed to the whims of nature, the pilgrims are the ones who must, as the Chinese put it, “feed on wind and rest on dew (),” who must be “capped by the moon and cloaked by the stars ().” Just as the cycles of ordeals and adversities accentuate the suffering of Tripitaka and his disciples, so even the ostensibly charming and innocuous shifts of the seasons add to the hardships (“The strong, cold wind / Tears at the sleeve! / How does one bear this chilly might of night?”) encountered on the way. In this manner, time is both spatialized and physicalized, its effect thus reinforcing our impression of how immense is the journey to the West.

  Their compelling descriptive power notwithstanding, these poems are sometimes, paradoxically, devoid of local color and impression. This is especially true of those designed to depict a place. Invariably the verse refers to precipitous cliffs and exotic flowers, to buildings of carved beam and verdant forests of pines and bamboos, to the cries of cranes and phoenixes, and to the congregation of rare and mythic animals. The poems, to be sure, vary in content and syntax, but if the author did not specify the location, it would be impossible to distinguish between the birthplace of Sun Wukong (Flower-Fruit Moutain) in chapter 1, the Black Wind Mountain in chapter 17, the Spirit Mountain (Lingshan) which is Buddha’s abode, in chapters 52 and 98, or the counterfeit Lingshan in chapter 65, where the pilgrims meet one of their most formidable adversaries.

  This perplexing fusion of the particular and the typical is what enables the entire narrative to be imbued with a kind of epic grandeur, energy, and expansiveness. In his thoughtful essay “The Realistic and Lyric Elements in the Chinese Medieval Story,” Jaroslav Průšek has suggested that the prose and poetic portions of the bianwen and the huaben constitute two levels of representing reality. Recalling how Balzac found it praiseworthy that Sir Walter Scott impregnated the novel “with the spirit of olden times, combined in it drama and dialogue, portrait, landscape and description, introduced into it fantasy and truth—elements typical of the epic [as a genre that, strictly speaking, was unknown in Chinese literary history]—and placed poetry in closest intimacy with the most ordinary speech,” Průśek thinks that the lyrical poetical insertions into the realistic prose segments of the Chinese story “form—possibly quite unintentionally—a kind of second plane to the actual story, raise it—even though it be unconsciously—to the demonstrations of a certain philosophical conception of the world.”106

  While Průšek’s observation, to some extent, can be applied to The Journey to the West, it does not quite isolate the particular virtue of the work. Its poetic insertions are neither “interludes” nor “interruptions”; they are, rather, integral parts of the total narrative. Not unlike some of the great landscape paintings of the Song and the Yuan periods, in which a thousand details subsist in a delicate union of concreteness and ideality, the poetry here at once heightens and elevates by pointing simultaneously to the concreteness of a certain site and to its mysterious and elemental character. Most important, the lyric impulse is always placed at the service of the epic; the descriptions do not call attention to themselves as poetic entities in their own right but, rather, constantly strengthen the elan and verve of the story. As Erich Auerbach has written so perceptively of The Divine Comedy, “the vivid descriptions of landscape in which the great poem abounds are never autonomous or purely lyrical; true, they appeal directly to the reader’s emotions, they arouse delight or horror; but the feelings awakened by the landscape are not allowed to seep away like vague romantic dreams, but forcefully recapitulated, for the landscape is nothing other than the appropriate scene or metaphorical symbol of human destiny.”107 Similarly, the mountains, the monasteries, the monsters, the deities, the rivers and plains, and the seasons in The Journey to the West are significant only in relation to the fate of the pilgrims. The appearance of any locality can be either menacing or tutelary precisely because it forebodes danger or shelter for Tripitaka and his companions. So too, the accounts of the glorious epiphany of Guanyin in chapter 12 and of the fearful visages of the Green-Hair Lion, the Yellow-Tusk Elephant, and the Garuda Monster in chapter 75 achieve their greatest impact only when the reader knows they can assist or impede the pilgrims’ progress.

  To stress the central importance of such experience and its influence on the quality of the poetry is not to overlook verbal humor, another often-praised aspect of the narrative. One of the best examples of narrative realism masterfully blended with comic irony may be found in chapter 67, where an elder of a village is seeking Monkey’s aid to rid the people of a python monster.

  “Oldie,” said Pilgrim [JW’s translation of xingzhe (disciple or acolyte), the nickname of Xuanzang gave to Sun Wukong], “the monster-spirit is not hard to catch. It is hard only because the families in this region are not united in their efforts.” “How did you reach this conclusion?” asked the old man.

  “For three years,” Pilgrim replied, “this monster-spirit has been a menace, taking the lives of countless creatures. If each family here were to donate an ounce of silver, I should think that five hundred families would yield at least five hundred ounces. With that amount of money, you could hire an exorcist anywhere who would be able to catch the fiend for you. Why did you permit him to torture you for these three years?”

  “If you bring up the subject of spending money,” said the old man, “I’m embarrassed to death! Which one of our families did not disburse indeed three or five ounces of silver? The year before last we found a monk from the south side of this mountain and invited him to come. But he didn’t succeed.” “How did that monk go about catching the monster?” asked Pilgrim.

  The old man said:

  “That man of the Saṅgha,

  He had on a kasāya,

  He first quoted the Peacock;

  He then chanted the Lotus.

  Burned incense in an urn;

  Grasped with his hand a bell.

  As he thus sang and chanted,

  He aroused the very fiend.

  Astride the clouds and the wind,

  He came to our village.

  The monk fo
ught with the fiend—

  In truth some tall tale to tell!

  One stroke brought forth a punch,

  One stroke delivered a scratch.

  The monk tried hard to respond:

  In response his hair was gone!

  In a while the fiend had won

  And gone back to mist and smoke.

  (Mere dried scabs being sunned!)108

  We drew near to take a look:

  The bald head was smashed like a watermelon!”

  The language of this passage may certainly bring to mind such works in the West as the Homeric Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice) and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. But what is noteworthy is how the XYJ author adds his own characteristic brand of wit at the expense of religion, for two lines of this particular poem poke fun at the Buddhist priest battling the python monster: “The monk tried hard to respond: / In response his hair was gone.” The word “respond” alludes to the Buddhist doctrine of mutual union, the correspondence of mind with mental data dependent on five kinds of correspondence common to both: the senses, reason, process, object, and time. Formally, this is called “the Law of Response or xiangying fa ,” but the last graph of the doctrinal phrase can in the vernacular mean simply method or power. The polysemia of the word elicits from our author the apt and hilarious pun on Buddhist law and power with the homonym “hair, fa ” that at once predicts the monk’s miserable defeat. Such witty construction notwithstanding, this is no mere episode of the mock heroic in The Journey to the West because its context remains most serious. Despite the scene’s relaxed, comic tone, the ordeal facing Pilgrim and his companion, Bajie, is not illusory. Shortly thereafter they will again have to battle a real and dangerous opponent in the figure of the monster, which is another part of the ordeal preordained for the pilgrims.

  This deliberate harnessing of the poetic elements to augment the narrative force may be detected also in many of the poetic speeches of the narrative. The technique of advancing the action through poetic dialogues is no doubt inherited directly from the colloquial short stories and popular dramas of earlier periods, but it has now become a highly flexible and effective device. Most of these speeches are spoken as challenges to battle or descriptions of weapons, for which the author of XYJ exploits the longer form of the pailü with utmost virtuosity. The challenges to battle are usually delivered immediately before the character engages in actual combat. They provide occasions for the speaker not only to indulge in polemical humor and to provoke his adversary, but also frequently to reminisce, to recount his own history. Thus, when Bajie demands from Sha Wujing his name and surname before the battle in chapter 22, this is the reply he receives:

  My spirit was strong since the time of birth.

  I had made a tour of the whole wide world,

  Where my fame as a hero became well known—

  A gallant type for all to emulate. [see 1: 424].

  Though this speech of poetic declamation by Sha Wujing, or any of those by other characters in the narrative (cf. chapters 19, 52, 70, 85, 86), is not comparable in length to, say, the tales of Odysseus, it serves a similar function, common to most heroic tales, of filling in the background of a hero’s life, just as “Homer makes Nestor boast of his lost youth or Phoenix tell of his lurid past.”109

  Finally, the last major function of the verse in XYJ concerns the provision of authorial commentary, in the form of prefatory synopsis of narrative meaning for a chapter, doctrinal exposition attributed to different characters, and allegorical interpretation of characters and incidents in the narrative. In chapter 19, to cite our first example, Monkey, after a fierce battle and a little requisite disclosure of his identity along with his membership in the scripture pilgrimage community, brought to submission the piglike, deliquent Daoist Marshal of Heavenly Reeds. As the two of them traveled back to greet their master in the Gao Village, the narrator broke into the following regulated poem:

  Strong is metal’s nature to vanquish wood:

  Mind Monkey has the Wood Dragon subdued.

  With metal and wood both obedient as one,

  All their love and virtue will grow and show.

  One guest and one host there’s nothing between;

  Three matings, three unions—there’s great mystery!

  Nature and feelings gladly fused as Last and First:

  Both will surely be enlightened in the West.

  Readers of premodern Chinese fiction know that countless persons—usually but not only male—would band together for martial, religious, or even literary reasons. In their association or society, fraternal or sorosistic order, they address each other in kinship terms like “brothers” and “sisters,” as they would likely do even in real life. Readers of this novel will realize that after chapter 19, when a third member of the pilgrimage is found in the figure of Zhu Bajie, the Pig, a little society of this nature has been formed, one that seems no different at all from similar collectivities emerging in the opening chapters of the novel Three Kingdoms at the Peaches Garden or that of the 108 outlaws by the Marshes of Mount Liang. Even premodern readers of Chinese fiction, however, may not have been prepared to understand the poem cited, in which strange terms and puzzling connections describe the new relationship between Xuanzang’s monkey disciple (already an odd and wholly unhistorical companion) and a renegade Daoist deity, now half-human and half-pig.

  Such a narrative tack persists throughout the lengthy story. When the pilgrims finally arrive near their long-sought destination, the Thunderclap Monastery that is Buddha’s abode in chapter 98—when, in sum, all five of the entourage in a most imaginatively narrated episode have succeeded in casting off the “shell” of their physical form during their perilous crossing of the Cloud-Transcending Stream—the narrator again intrudes with this enigmatic quatrain:

  Delivered from their mortal flesh and bone,

  A primal spirit of mutual love has grown.

  Their work done, they become Buddhas this day,

  Free of their former six-six senses’s sway.

  It requires no keen perception to notice that metaphors again abound in these four lines of verse, but what sort of allegory are they attempting to create for us readers? Is this also part of how “the book plainly allegorizes the Dao’s perfection , ,” to quote again Chen Yuanzhi’s words in a portion of the first printed edition’s preface cited in part II of this introduction? Some answer to such questions will occupy our analysis in part IV of this introduction. The present section of the introduction will end with a comprehensive listing of identifiable sources, cited in whole or in part, verbatim or modified, from Daoist texts that are canonical or noncanonical. Most of these quotations or paraphrastic allusions are poems or revised parts thereof, but there are several prose passages as well. The text of XYJ presents us with at least twenty such citations as follows:

  1. Chapter 2, p. 16: The long poem uttered by the Patriarch Subodhi as an oral formula to instruct Sun Wukong at night on the secrets of internal alchemy. The poem was quoted verbatim in Fu Qinjia , Zhongguo Daojiao shi (Taiwan, 1975, reprint of Shanghai, 1937), p. 131. Fu did not indicate whether the novel XYJ was, in fact, the source of the poem or whether it was used both in the novel and elsewhere. He simply stated that the piece was used by those “in the cultivation of the Way in posterity” to explain certain passages and terminologies in the Huangting neijing jing , DZ 331 (Eastern Jin, 317–420 CE), and in the Qianque leishu (ed. Chen Renxi , printed in 1631–1633 and officially banned book of 120 j).

  2. Chapter 7, p. 70: A quatrain celebrating Sun Wukong’s iron rod begins with the line, “One beam of light supernal fills the supreme void.” It is a slightly altered quotation of a poetic line by the patriarch Ma Danyang (1131–1183 CE) of the northern lineage of the Quanzhen Order and the first disciple of the founder, Wang Chongyang. See the “Jianxing song ,” in Dongxuan jinyu ji , from DZ 1149, 25: 590.

  3. Chapter 8, p. 78: Prefatorial verse in the form of a lyric, to the tune of “Su Wu
in Slow Pace .” With alteration of only the last three lines, it is a full citation of a lyric to the same tune by one Feng Zunshi , in Minghe yuyin , from DZ 1100, 24: 262–63.

  4. Chapter 11, p. 115: Prefatorial verse that begins with the line, “A hundred years pass by like flowing streams .” The heptasyllabic regulated poem actually is a poetic paraphrase and partial adaptation of a prose “Shengtang wen (Proclamation upon the ascension of the Main Hall, a ritual text),” by one Qin Zhenren , in Minghe yuyin, DZ 1100, 24: 308–09.

  5. Chapter 12, p. 133: The text for the deliverance of the orphaned souls drafted by Xuanzang for the emperor to approve before the start of the Grand Mass of Land and Water. The entire prose portion that begins with the sentence, “The supreme virtue is vast and endless, for Buddhism is founded upon Nirvāṇa , [likely a generic use of the term Chan] ,” is a reworking of the opening segment of another “Shengtang wen” by Feng Zunshi, in Minghe yuyin, 24: 308. The text also is collected in the Dongyuan ji , DZ 1063, 23: 875, as “Shengtang shizhong (Ascending the Hall to instruct the multitude),” but here there is no indication of author.

  6. Chapter 14, p. 153: The prefatorial poem beginning with the line, “The Buddha is Mind and the Mind is Buddha .” As indicated in part I of this introduction, this piece directly reworks an ode by Zhang Boduan (982/4?–1082), reputed founder of the southern lineage of the Quanzhen Order. See the Wuzhen pian , gathered in the collection, Xiuzhen shishu in DZ 263, 4: 746.