Best Way to Read Journey Ti the West
THE COMPLETE 'MONKEY'
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March 6, 1983
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THE Journey TO THE Westward Translated and Edited by Anthony C. Yu. Volume One. 530 pp. Material, $35. Newspaper, $8.95. Book Ii. 438 pp. Fabric, $35. Paper, $12.50. Book Three. 454 pp. Cloth, $35. Volume Four. 45l pp. Cloth, $35. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
IN 1942 Arthur Waley, the foremost British translator of Chinese and Japanese literature, published in England a volume called ''Monkey,'' an adventurous fantasy paraphrased from certain chapters of an old novel, known in its 16th-century Chinese original equally ''Xiyou ji'' (''The Journey to the West''). In 1943 - but 40 years agone - there followed an American edition of the Waley book. I turned 12 that year and got a re-create for my birthday. I read and reread it; I drew illustrations for it; and for weeks or months I tagged along, in imagination, with its impudent and valiant hero, the Monkey King, as he established his reign over the Cave of the H2o Curtain, learned martial and magic arts, extorted a wonder-working cudgel from the Dragon of the Eastern Sea, raided Hell and Sky, stole Laozi'south elixir, was punished by Buddha and redeemed himself as the true-blue (although not very well-behaved) disciple of an absurdly incompetent saint, Tripitaka, with whom he trudged westward to the Vulture Summit in search of holy sutras and shastras - fighting demons all the manner, of course. For a boy of 12 it was a delectable introduction to Chinese literature. ''Monkey'' is still a minor landmark of 20th-century English language translation. Edith Sitwell judged shrewdly its fit of style to thing, praising its ''absence of shadow, like the clearance and directness of Monkey's mind''; she called information technology ''a masterpiece of correct sound.''
Honor where accolade is due. Waley's ''Monkey'' has several sorts of permanent value. Simply it must now relinquish its ever slender claim to represent, with any degree of substantiality, the Chinese original. Waley may accept caught the colour of Monkey's mind, but in his 300 pages, rendering less than a third of the complete work, he made no try to capture the scale of the original ''Journeying to the West'': its spiritual depths or its rich variations of manner. To judge these things, the reader of English will now plow to a version that quite magnificently supersedes Waley's: ''The Journeying to the West,'' edited and translated by Anthony C. Yu, who is a professor in the Divinity School - and also in the departments of English and of Far Eastern Languages - at the Academy of Chicago. The appearance of the fourth volume now -the starting time three were issued in 1977, 1978 and 1980 -completes 1 of the great ventures of our time inhumanistic translation and publication. Like nearly of the large and artistically of import Chinese novels, ''The Journey to the W'' dates from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Some of these novels have undergone massive expansions and contractions over the centuries, and it tin can be extremely difficult to tell which versions are older or more administrative. The textual history of ''The Journey to the Westward'' is relatively unproblematic. The standard modernistic version, translated by Mr. Yu, is essentially the aforementioned as what is thought to be the first edition, in 100 chapters, published (the author was anonymous) at Nanjing in 1592. (Mr. Yu'south version differs from this mainly by the improver of a unmarried episode, drawn from a short version of the novel dating to nigh the same era.) The narrative is mostly in a polished colloquial prose, but about 750 poems and poesy passages in an older and more classical linguistic communication are interspersed through the book. These introduce, summarize or comment upon the activity, sometimes in the cabalistic language of mythology or alchemy, or they provide descriptive set-pieces - landscapes, battles, banquets. They may suggest the turning of the seasons and thus the passage of time during the long westward pilgrimage, or they may permit a warrior - whether priest or demon - to brand his brag earlier gainsay. Mr. Yu has translated all of this, giving us for the commencement time the whole of ''The Journey to the Due west'' in English language - in 1,873 pages. It is the tale of a monk sent to heaven in quest of the bones Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by a Sand Monk, a Monkey Male monarch and a pig spirit, among others; their adventures occur on many literary and intellectual levels at in one case in a story that moves with surprising speed through its many chapters.
Everything nearly ''The Journey to the West'' suggests a basically intact text by a unmarried writer. Every bit a poet, the author enjoys showing off his mastery of every poesy course, from the four-line jue-ju to lengthy ''rhymeprose'' (fu) and his own idiosyncratic expansion of the aria grade (qu) used in song cycles and operas since the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Yet poetry and prose harmonize throughout in a functional way. The verse is simple, lively and descriptive. The way it naturally fits into the prose has helped insure its survival, since verse has disappeared from many of the one-time Chinese novels. The poesy in this one concentrates our vision, thrusting us among the concrete details of life, rendering everything visible, smellable, tangible. Thus the monkey hero, on a spying mission, transforms himself into a moth: A small shape with light, active wings, He dives to snuff candles and lamps. By metamorphosis he gains his truthful course, Nearly agile midst rotted grasses. He strikes flames for love of hot light, Flying, circling without ceasing. Purple-robed, fragrant-winged, chasing the fireflies, He likes most the deep windless nighttime.
The author loves to stroke his characters: ''Love Monkey!'' ''Honey monster!'' ''Dear air current!'' Dear men!'' But who was this good-humored author? We do not know. In the 1920'southward an old theory was revived by the mod scholar Hu Shih, claiming authorship for a sure Wu Cheng-en, a minor author of Huai-an in Jiangsu, where the Grand Canal used to cross the Yellow River. In an introduction to the 1943 American edition of Waley, Hu Shih - who past then was Chinese Ambassador in Washington - wrote that the local history or gazetteer of Huai-an, dated 1625, ''definitely recorded that the novel . . . was written by him . . . the first Chinese novel of which the authorship is now authentically established.'' The Administrator'south confidence was quite unjustified. What the gazetteer says is that Wu wrote something called ''The Journey to the West.'' It mentions goose egg about a novel. The work in question could have been whatsoever version of our story, or something else entirely. In a bibliography of the time information technology is listed equally a work of geography. Although some libraries probably catalogue ''The Journey to the West'' nether Wu Cheng-en's name, that proper noun does not appear on the title folio of Anthony Yu'southward translation.
Despite the articulate handiwork of one author throughout, this is by no means a story made of whole material. Its main source is well known. It is the story of Tripitaka, an actual monk - his religious name was Xuan-zang - who lived from 602 to 664. He was given the title Tripitaka, which means ''the three baskets'' or, so to speak, 3 testaments of the Buddhist scriptures, by a Chinese emperor. The title was advisable, since in the words of the eminent Buddhologist Paul Demieville he was ''the Saint Jerome of Chinese Buddhism,'' greatest among the hundred-odd Chinese ''scripture pilgrims'' who went to India in search of holy writ betwixt the 3rd and eighth centuries. Tripitaka left China for 16 years, get-go probably in 627. He spent 12 years in Bharat, where he mastered Sanskrit, and he returned to China with 657 scriptural and other texts, 75 of which he with his helpers translated into Chinese.
THE accounts of the monk'southward career come up from disciples who had admission to his own papers, and they are relatively free of legendary material, even though they record a few visions and probably exaggerate Tripitaka's triumphs as a courtroom figure, religious debater and outwitter of bandits in India and Key Asia. At some unknown phase, however, Tripitaka's story entered the world of pop storytelling, accumulating legendary textile in profusion. Very likely Tripitaka became a subject field of bian-wen, morally instructive song-and-story routines performed by mendicant Buddhist entertainers in late Tang times. From the Song dynasty (960-1,280) nosotros have two Chinese chapbooks preserved past chance in the Kozanji Monastery nearly Kyoto, Japan. These books, a humble reflection of the professional storytelling art good at that time in urban teahouses, present a course of the Tripitaka story that must already have required many evenings of serial narration to chronicle in total. In them Tripitaka had already caused superhero disciplines, along with the Monkey King and the grunter spirit Zhu Ba-jie, known also equally Idiot (or in Waley as Pigsy).
By the 14th century the multiple episodes of these stories may or may not have been assembled in a novel. Operas based on the Tripitaka wheel survive from that time. Perchance non until the anonymous 100-affiliate novel of 1592, nonetheless, did the crucial change occur, with Monkey displacing Tripitaka every bit the principal character, arrogating to himself the opening vii chapters of ''The Journey to the W.''
Men of the early republican period, like Hu Shih, felt that traditional colloquial novels such as ''The Journey to the West'' ought to serve as a new kind of classic, lending authorization to modern schooling in vernacular Chinese, merely as the Confucian classics had lent authority to schooling in the ancient Chinese that had prevailed down to the time of Earth State of war I.
Just Hu Shih's contemporaries were ambivalent virtually the old novels. Their episodic form was an embarrassment because it was non ''modern'' by the standards of European naturalism and realism. Their allegorical content was an embarrassment because it was Confucian and thus reactionary, and Buddhist or Taoist and thus superstitious. Of the ideological thing in ''The Journey to the W'' the nigh salvageable, for Hu, was the satire, especially the portrayal of the heavenly hierarchy as a caricature of the earthly, imperial bureaucracy. Indeed, while there is much spiritual doctrine in ''The Journey to the Due west,'' nil is sacrosanct. Buddha'due south ain disciples demand cumshaw earlier yielding the scriptures sought by the pilgrims, giving the bribe-taker's usual self-justification: ''If we imparted the scriptures to y'all gratis, our posterity would starve to death!'' That from a pair of celestial celibates.
ANTHONY C. YU belongs to a newer generation of scholars who have come to appreciate much more fully than those of Hu Shih's fourth dimension the intellectual, emblematic side of erstwhile Chinese fiction. The most original office of his splendidly comprehensive 62-page introduction to the ''Journey'' gives us a glimpse of his ain investigations into relations betwixt the novel and obscure portions of the vast, littleknown Taoist canon. While his translation does full justice to the gamble, lyricism and buffoonery of ''The Journeying to the West,'' it is completely sensitive to the spiritual content of the text also.
''The Journey to the West'' embodies several kinds of stories that either are or tend to stand for a spiritual drama. First, like the Gospels, the Arthurian and Robin Hood stories and the Chinese novel ''Water Margin'' (likewise known every bit ''All Men Are Brothers'' or ''The Outlaws of the Marshes''), it is the story of the gathering of a alliance - in this case the ring of pilgrims including Tripitaka, Monkey, Idiot, Sand-Monk and their horse which is a modest transformed dragon. Second, like the Grail legend and most fairy stories, ''The Journey to the West'' is a quest. The quest is a drama of perils overcome, oft after initial failure, perils that commonly take the class of a temptation. The quest as a whole is penitential: Idiot and Sand-Monk are celestial immortals banished to earth, one for flirting with a moon spirit, the other for breaking a drinking glass at a heavenly banquet. The horse is a young cut-up who set burn to the business firm of his dragon father. Even Tripitaka is a fallen spirit, the Buddha's own disciple Golden Cicada, who fell asleep during a lecture by the Master and then must undergo purgation through 81 tribulations.
In role, ''The Journey to the West'' is an allegory too, just only in part. At one point Monkey murders six robbers who must exist taken as what Buddhists think of every bit six senses. A typical trivial allegorical touch occurs later, when some bodhisattvas test the pilgrims' purity by appearing to them as wealthy beauties; Idiot, succumbing equally usual, finds that their house contains lofty thresholds, ''causing him constantly to stumble and autumn.'' A graphic symbol in strict apologue, however, is a personification and not a person, merely an attribute of people and their experiences, such as a virtue, vice, passion or faculty. But Tripitaka himself began equally a historical person, not a personification. In ''The Journey to the West'' he has been said to stand for Everyman, only that would non distinguish him from any other major figure in novels. The character of Monkey in this book may have derived in some way from Chinese folklore, from the monkeyfamiliar Hanumat in the Indian ''Ramayana'' ballsy, or from both; in ''The Journey to the West'' he is ane of several animal spirits, amidst whom are a acquit and a mink that have become Taoist immortals. Monkey, like Tripitaka, begins every bit a kind of person, not a personification.
Merely undeniably he has become, in function, a personification. In a very ancient Buddhist formula, cited several times in the novel, he is the ''monkey of the listen.'' As Monkey stands for mind, and so Idiot stands for body; inside his hoggish bulk lurks the uncontrollable domestic tenderness of Papageno.
The Mind-Monkey, and so, is partly an abstraction. Not simply that, merely he has been abstracted from Tripitaka, leaving that saint an astonishingly stupid figure, compared with his historical original. In this novel, Tripitaka is humanness minus intelligence, which therefore cannot survive without its intelligent monkey servant. By himself Tripitaka hangs onto the purity and kindliness of the self; yet he is sluggish, petty-minded, lacking in judgment, able but to worry and whimper through his 81 ordeals. His purity, incidentally, creates hazards. Having totally retained his semen through 10 incarnations, he represents a concentration of ''cardinal yang'' that is enormously tempting to monsters, male and female, who stand to gain greater power, the males by devouring him, the females past seducing him. However, information technology is but the human Tripitaka who can win the scriptures from heaven, walking there at a homo footstep. Mind-Monkey and pig-trunk must restrain themselves and back-trail him. They themselves can fly through the air, wielding mighty weapons, but they cannot lift and transport the weight of a human being soul.
IN dissimilarity to the pedestrian Tripitaka, Monkey is all energy and impetuousness. A central insight of the book is that intelligence, on its ain, rushes headlong, far alee of judgment and pity. And full commitment is one of the gifts of intelligence, then Monkey begins with total commitment to Taoist self-cultivation and ends with total commitment to the Buddhist quest. Mr. Yu, among others, has observed that ''The Journey to the Due west'' represents non merely the jumble of religions in folk conventionalities simply an intelligent Ming motility to syncretize Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The monkey is an intelligence that has mastered Taoist powers merely must learn the meekness and pity of Buddhism.
In the West we are familiar with novels, such as ''Don Quixote'' and ''Madame Bovary,'' about those who have been led off-target by novels. ''The Journeying to the West'' translates a novel nigh a great translator. I am glad, though, that Mr. Yu has cast his translation more in the Mind-Monkey'southward vivid spirit than in the pallid spirit of the translator Tripitaka as this novel represents him. With Monkey's utter candor, but also with something of Monkey's grace and strength, Mr. Yu cavorts fearlessly, and in graphic, uncondescending literalness, through more than 81 difficulties. This is the most exciting translation of any volume I accept read in quite some fourth dimension.
If you know a 12-year-erstwhile, give him or her the ''Monkey'' of Arthur Waley. Do not exist surprised, though, if your 12-twelvemonth-old comes back for more than - for the whole thing, Mr. Yu'south ''Journey to the West.'' And read it yourself. Information technology will win you merit on your ain westward journey to the Spirit Mountain of Tathagata.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/06/books/the-complete-monkey.html
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