Journey to the West. Wu Cheng'en
scriptures to China, after which he attains Buddhahood. Between the introductory section and the final conclusion there are 86 chapters. In each of these, the pilgrims are confronted with various demons and monsters, fight with them, defeat them, and continue the journey. Many of the stories extend over several chapters. The geography of The Record of Western Regions is real, including modern Xinjiang, Afghanistan, and India; the geography of the novel is a series of kingdoms of barbarians with strange customs, suspicious temples, and monasteries where danger usually lurks, or mountains and ravines inhabited by demons who live on human flesh. These are usually anxious to eat Xuanzang himself, as his holiness would confer immortality. The demons, too, have previous lives: they are usually animal spirits in semi-human form. Apart from the demons, there are formidable physical trials: raging rivers, burning mountains, a kingdom ruled by amazons, the land of spider spirits and so on. After a pilgrimage said to have taken fourteen years, they arrive at the half-real, half-legendary destination of Vulture Peak, where Xuanzang meets Buddha, and explains his mission. Buddha is gracious but a bit condescending; he tells his assistants to provide the Chinese travelers with some sutras, but they cheat them, giving them blank sheets of paper. The last chapter describes the return journey to China (flying with celestial messengers, not on foot as in the real story) and a final trial, where they almost lose the scriptures in the fictionalized version of the crossing of the Indus. Here the elephant becomes a tortoise, and the river separating India from China becomes the demarcation line between the Land of Bliss in Paradise and the land of unenlightened souls on earth. They stay on earth only for long enough to deliver the scriptures to the Tang emperor, after which they are returned to Paradise and their just rewards.
(3) DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The only characters who appear regularly throughout the book are the monk, the monkey and the pig. The horse, a former dragon who has also fallen from grace, is sometimes considered a fourth disciple but rarely appears. His job is less to defend the Master than to carry him to India, and carry the scriptures back to China. The various demons they meet along the way are dealt with and usually not mentioned again, though there are occasionally some references to earlier adventures. There are also a number of supernatural actors of both Buddhist and Taoist persuasion who get involved in both celestial and earthly matters from time to time. These are:
(1) The Jade Emperor: a Taoist deity, he lives in the Celestial Palace. He is served by a bureaucracy rather like an earthly one, but his ministers are various spirits, stars, and planets.
(2) The Queen of Heaven, the queen of the female immortals. Another inhabitant of the Celestial Palace. Her garden contained the peach of immortality, which bloomed only once in three thousand years. She could confer immortality on her guests at her peach banquets.
(3) The Ancient of Days, an unusual and memorable name for the Patriarch, a disciple of Buddha, but in the novel seems to be in the Taoist camp. A sort of adviser and ambassador at large.
(4) The Minister of Venus and the Minister of Jupiter: personifications of the spirits of these planets. Their role is rather like the ministers in a Chinese traditional bureaucracy.
(5) Yama, the King of Hell; Judge Cui, the Chief Judge of Hell, the Ten Judges of Hell; Guardian King Li and his sons Nezha and Mucha, various Messengers and other servants: other officials in the nether world of folk religion where the doctrines and spirits of Buddhism and Taoism become very blurred.
(6) The Buddha. In the novel he was many names: The Incarnate Model, the Ideal, the Buddha to Come, the Cosmic Buddha, Maitreya, Tatagatha, and many others. The historical Buddha was a real person, referred to in the novel as Shakyamuni. Buddha appears early in the novel to help the Taoist Jade Emperor suppress the Monkey, and reminds him of his rather insignificant place in the grand scheme of things: when the Monkey thinks he can jump as far as the end of the universe, he finds he has not left the palm of the Buddha. This is the theme of one of the most common bronze curios available in the flea markets of modern Beijing. Buddha appears from time to time, but mainly at the end of the novel, where he presents the true scriptures to the monk for the salvation of lost souls in the Middle Kingdom in the East.
(7) Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. Her Chinese name means “She who hears the sounds of misery of the world.” In some ways the architect of the whole enterprise: Guanyin seeks permission from Buddha to bring enlightenment to the people of the East, which coincides with the vow of the Chinese emperor to found a society for the salvation of lost souls. Whenever in trouble he cannot manage, the Monkey appeals to Guanyin, who comes to the rescue. It is in Guanyin’s interests that the mission succeeds, despite finding the tactics of the Monkey and the others a bit distasteful from time to time.
(8) Ananda and Kasyapa: the major disciples of the Buddha, presented in an unflattering light in this novel. They expect to be paid for the scriptures Xuanzang has sacrificed so much to obtain for the benefit of others, and when Monkey threatens to make a fuss, give them scrolls of “wordless sutras”—plain paper. The pilgrims only discover this when they have left, and eventually Buddha’s disciples supply them with written scriptures, on the grounds that their level of enlightenment was not enough to enable them to understand the wordless ones.
(9) The Emperor Taizong. Apart from the monk, the only human and historically real character in the book. The second emperor of the Tang, he is widely considered the greatest emperor in Chinese history. When Xuanzang set off on his journey, there was a ban on all travel to the interior because of the general military chaos of the time, but when Xuanzang returned in 645 his fame had come before him, and he was warmly welcomed by Taizong, in both the novel and in historical fact. Incidentally, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda that we can now visit in Xi’an is not the pagoda built for Xuanzang, in which he translated the scriptures into Chinese. This was made of mud and clay, and decayed within fifty years. The present structure was rebuilt by Empress Wu Zetian (625-705), and has been partially destroyed and repaired several times.
(10) The real Xuanzang is described in his biography written by Huili. The fictional Tang monk is true to the ideals of abstinence, vegetarianism, and refusal to take life, so Guanyin provides him with three powerful disciples who look after the messier side of life for him. In the novel he is typically attacked, either by demons who want to eat him or women who want to seduce him. He cannot defend himself: that is what the disciples are there for. But he is continuously frustrated at the lack of seriousness and dedication of the disciples: the Monkey is violent and rebellious, and quits several times; the Pig is lazy and always in search of food or pretty women. These altercations between the Monk, the Pig, and the Monkey also provide much of the material of the novel that is not dealing with external threats, but internal ones. Xuanzang has a clear and unwavering sense of mission, which provides the novel with a unifying theme.
(11) Sun Wukong. Originally called the Stone Monkey, he becomes the Monkey King, the Seeker of Secrets, the Pilgrim, and Sun Wukong, “Aware of Emptiness.” Born of a rock, he established himself as Monkey King by showing his courage in entering the Waterfall Cave at the Flower and Fruit Mountain, where no other monkey dared to go. After some time he became restless and went in search of adventure. He caused so much trouble in Heaven that the Four Heavenly Kings and Nezha, the son of Guardian King Li, leading an army of a hundred thousand celestial soldiers, tried to defeat him, without success. Fearless and irreverent of everybody, he upset many Taoist and Buddhist deities, so the Jade Emperor sought the help of Buddha. He was imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years, and only rescued when Xuanzang came by him on his pilgrimage and accepted him as a disciple. The meeting was really arranged by Guanyin, of course. He is always depicted with his staff, named “As You Like It,” which was originally a pillar supporting the Palace of the Dragon King. This staff, together with his devouring of the peaches of immortality and his ordeal in the eight trigram furnace, which gave him a steel hard body and fiery golden eyes, makes Sun Wukong pretty much invincible. He can only be controlled by a cap of spikes placed around his head by Guanyin, which he cannot remove by himself. The mantra that can tighten the spikes around his head is about the only thing Monkey is scared of, and is Xuanzang’s final resort to try to bring his obstreperous disciple to heel.
(12) Zhu Bajie, also known as Zhu the Pig, or Zhu Wuneng “Aware of Ability.” He is usually called Zhu Bajie, the “Eight Prohibitions,” a name given him by Guanyin to remind him of his Buddhist vows, so much