Journey to the West (A Mission to Heaven)

Summary

Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation. It is Timothy Richard's A Mission to Heaven (Shanghai, 1913), which keeps the original's hundred numbered chapters but translates only some of them at length, reduces most of the rest to short outlines, and adds bracketed notes and chapter captions that read the Buddhist and Daoist story as an allegory close to Christian teaching. Richard's names are older romanizations: the monk is Huen Chwang, called the Master; the Buddha is Julai; the bodhisattva of mercy is Kwanyin; the pig is Pa Kiel; the river monk is Sa Ho Shang. The first seven chapters, the fullest in Richard's version, tell the story of the Monkey. A stone egg on the Flower and Fruit Mountain hatches a monkey who becomes king of the monkeys, then, afraid of death, crosses the sea to seek immortality. A Daoist master names him Sun and teaches him seventy-two transformations and cloud-somersaults. He takes an iron pillar from the Dragon King's sea as his shrinking and growing staff, strikes his name from the registers of death, is given a petty post in heaven as keeper of the horses, and, offended, proclaims himself the Great Holy One, Equal of Heaven. Set to guard the immortal peaches, he eats them, spoils the Peach Banquet and swallows Laozi's elixir pills, survives the eight-trigram furnace, and fights the heavenly armies until Buddha challenges him to leap out of his palm. He cannot, and is pressed under the Five Elements Mountain for five hundred years. The middle chapters prepare the pilgrimage: the Tang Emperor's visit to the underworld, the All Souls' festival, and Kwanyin's call for a monk to fetch scriptures. On the road the Master frees Sun, who must wear a cap of spikes that tightens when he disobeys, and gathers Pa Kiel, the river monk, and a dragon who becomes his white horse. Eighty-one trials follow, mostly summarized: demons who want to eat the monk's flesh, the corpse of a murdered king restored to life, a contest of two identical Monkeys, the Flaming Mountain quenched by an iron fan, a poisoning at a Daoist temple, a kingdom whose ruler is healed by pulse-taking. At last the pilgrims reach Buddha's mountain, receive blank scriptures from disciples who wanted a gift, exchange them for written ones, and return to China, where all five are raised to holy rank. The Chinese novel's earliest surviving edition is dated 1592; its attribution to Wu Cheng'en is traditional.

Top Lessons

• Power without humility

  Sun can cross eighteen thousand li in a leap, yet his boast that he can jump out of Buddha's palm ends with him writing his name on Buddha's finger. The early chapters show great gifts turned to disorder by pride, and the rest of the book shows the same gifts put to service.

• A journey that trains the travelers

  The scriptures could have been carried by cloud in an instant, but the pilgrims must walk, and Kwanyin even adds a final trial to make eighty-one. The book treats the hardships of the road as the real education of the monk and his disciples.

• Unlike companions on one road

  The quick Monkey, the greedy Pa Kiel, the steady river monk and the timid Master quarrel constantly, and the Master twice sends Sun away. The company succeeds only when they need and forgive one another.

• Reading a work through a translator's eyes

  Richard calls the Jade Emperor God, Laozi the Ancient of Days, and the coming Buddha Maitreya the Messiah, and he labels his version a Christian allegory. Students learn to separate the Chinese novel's Buddhist and Daoist world from the frame a 1913 missionary translator placed around it.

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Medical Lens

The novel draws on several traditions of Chinese medicine and longevity practice. The Monkey's search for immortality, the peaches and elixir pills of heaven, and Laozi's eight-trigram crucible belong to Daoist alchemy, in which refined substances and inner cultivation were believed to prolong life; Richard's English renders the crucible scene in the language of smelting dross. In Chapter LXIX (summarized by Richard) Sun takes the pulse of a sick king through a string tied to his wrist, a legendary form of the classical Chinese pulse diagnosis, and the chapter refers to a pharmacopoeia of hundreds of remedies; the king's illness is traced to grief at the loss of his wife. Chapter LXXIII heads its account of a poisoning with the maxim that long-nursed hatred produces illness, an idea of emotion acting on the body found in Chinese medical thought. A murdered king's preserved body is restored to life in Chapters XXXVII–XXXIX. These episodes are fantastic and allegorical, and Richard summarizes several of them, so they are pointers to the history of ideas rather than records of practice.

• Chapters V–VII

  The immortal peaches, the elixir pills in Laozi's gourds, and the forty-nine days in the eight-trigram crucible, from which the Monkey emerges with smoke-reddened eyes.

• Chapter LXIX

  Sun diagnoses a king's illness at a distance by a string attached to his wrist; the illness proves to be grief for an abducted wife.

• Chapter LXXIII

  The pilgrims are poisoned with tea at a Daoist temple and saved by antidote pills from a bodhisattva; the chapter heading links hatred to illness.

• Chapters XXXVII–XXXIX

  The body of a murdered king, preserved in a well, is carried to the Master and restored to life.