Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch

Author:David Damrosch [Damrosch, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Shanghai–Beijing: Journeys to the West

46. Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West

Moving eastward from India to China, we begin with a novel that moves westward from China to India. Journey to the West is based on an actual journey by a seventh-century monk named Xuanzang, who spent seventeen years traveling and studying in Central Asia and India. He finally returned to China in 645 with a trove of more than 600 Buddhist treatises, and he spent the rest of his life working with a team of colleagues to translate the Sanskrit originals and to write commentaries on them. Master Xuanzang’s emperor asked him to write down the story of his epochal journey, and nearly a millennium later, his Great Tang Records of the Western Regions became the basis for one of the “Four Classics” of traditional Chinese fiction.

Published anonymously in 1592, Journey to the West is usually attributed to Wu Cheng’en, a minor official in the Ming Dynasty. In Wu’s account, Master Xuanzang is called Tripitaka, or “Three Baskets,” referring to three categories of Buddhist texts he brought home. He travels with four fanciful companions provided for him by Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy: a reformed river ogre, a humanized pig, a dragon-turned-horse, and most importantly a loquacious and unruly monkey, Sun Wukong or “Monkey Awakened to Emptiness.” Together, they become a sort of Fellowship of the Sutras. In the course of a hundred chapters, they surmount eighty-one dangers and ordeals, from wild animals to bandits to demons, before finally reaching their goal in India, where they receive the gift of scriptures from the Buddha himself.

The historical Xuanzang was a pilgrim who ventured to India despite an imperial ban on foreign travel, but Wu Cheng’en adds a Confucian emphasis. He makes Tripitaka a faithful servant of his emperor, who commissions him to seek out the scriptures, and the opening and closing chapters frame the tale within sixteenth-century concerns over imperial governance and the growth of bureaucracy. Further, the eighty-one adventures that occupy the bulk of the narrative feature alchemical practices and magical transformations common to popular Daoism. Whereas Xuanzang was devoted to textual analysis and philosophical debate, Wu’s narrative reflects a Daoist understanding of the world as fundamentally a mental construct, with meaning best grasped through wordless meditation. At one point, Tripitaka and Sun Wukong are arguing over the meaning of a key Sanskrit text, the Heart Sutra: “ ‘Ape-head!’ snapped Tripitaka. ‘How dare you say that I don’t know its interpretation! Do you?’ ” Sun Wukong insists that he does, but then falls silent. When the pig and the ogre mock him as too ignorant to respond, Tripitaka reproves them. “Stop this claptrap!” he says; “Wukong made his interpretation in a speechless language. That’s true interpretation.”1

According to the novel, the Buddha has observed that in China, “they are greedy, lustful, murderous and quarrelsome. I wonder whether a knowledge of the True Scriptures would not cause some improvement in them?” And so he inspires China’s emperor to send a pilgrim to receive his “three baskets” of scriptures.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.