Book review: Journey To The West

[lethargic_man]

Book review: Monkey, by Wû Ch'êng-Ên (吴承恩) (ca. 1505-80); Penguin Classics edition 1942, tr. Arthur Waley.

I spotted this book going for 59p in a charity shop, and had bought it before I realised its title was not in fact the Journey To The West I thought it was. Nevertheless, this book is indeed the one of that title referred to at the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt.

The first part of Years of Rice and Salt ("Awake To Emptiness"), I discovered, reading this book, borrows its style; for example the lines of poetry littered through the text, and the cute chapter endings ("If you do not know how the Emperor came to life again, you must read what is told in the next chapter"). Goodness knows how many more such references there must be in Years of Rice and Salt that passed me by.

The book tells the story of the seventh century journey of 玄奘 (Hsüan Tsang, Xuanzang), known as Tripitaka^*, to India in the seventh century to bring back Mahayana Buddhism to China. The real Xuanzang's life and journey sound quite impressive, and I might like to read more about them in the future; this book, however, is a fairy tale compounded of the wealth of legends which had grown up around them in the intervening centuries.

Tripitaka is accompanied on his travels by a three irreverent disciples, Monkey -- described by Wikipedia as comparable to Bugs Bunny for popularity, recognition factor and personality in Asia -- Pigsy, and Sandy Priest; the book tells their many adventures on the way^†, subduing demons and righting wrongs.

The novel is frequently light-hearted; when, for instance, Monkey and Pigsy, having disguised themselves as the children to be sacrificed to a monster, reveal their true identities to fight the monster, the monster retorts, "Are you aware you can be sued for impersonation"?

Though the Tang dynasty was a cosmopolitan one, and had protectorates stretching into Central Asia, the book (written many centuries after the time it is set in) shows an ignorance of geography and culture outside China. The realms we encounter on the road to India have names like Crow Cock and Cart Slow, and though we encounter rivers of prodigious widths and so forth, there's no sign of the real obstacles separating India from China, like the Himalaya and Hindu-Kush mountains, and the Gobi Desert. (The River of Flowing Sands (a real river), where we encounter Sandy, though, reminiscent of "Great Sand River", the name by which the Gobi Desert was known in the time of Xuanzang, suggests there may be still nuggets of half-remembered knowledge in the text.)

The one exception to this is the use of Sanskrit names, but these I suspect were rendered afresh into English from Sanskrit, rather than via Chinese. (The one example I can think of off the top of my head of a Sanskrit word (Dhyāna) getting mangled into Chinese (Chan) was rendered in this edition by its more familiar Japanese form (Zen).)

Indeed, I found the book reminding me of the way Europeans in the Middle Ages were largely ignorant of the world outside Europe (though it doesn't approach the degree of geographic fantasy we find in the Travels of Sir John de Mandeville). The book was also reminiscent of the Odyssey, in the way that gods and goddesses (specifically, Pallas Athena in the one, and the Boddhisatva Guanyin (觀音菩薩) in the other) keep interfering in the affairs of the protagonists.

All in all, a fun light-hearted read, and introduction to Chinese classics for someone who knows very little about Chinese culture. I've spent far too long putting this review together, though. ;^)

* "Three Baskets", referring to the collections of Buddhist scripture he brings back to China. Wikipedia informs me that this is used in the English to render the Chinese Sanzang (三藏), but by translating it the pun on Xuanzang's name is lost.

† Actually, only thirty of the hundred chapters are included in the Waley translation -- not necessarily a bad thing, as the work would probably come out too picaresque if told in full.