Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

ALTHOUGH THE definition may vary among scholars of religion, there is fairly widespread agreement that certain fundamental characteristics are common to all true religious pilgrimages. In the words of one study, at least three elements must be present: “L’existence d’un lieu consacré où l’on se rend spécialement, le déplacement collectif ou individual vers ce lieu, et enfin le but de ce déplacement, qui est l’obtention d’un certain bien matérial ou spirituel.”¹ Not every protracted journey of adventures or one in which the traveler or travelers engage in various heroic or dangerous exploits will perforce qualify to be called a pilgrimage. What renders the individual or collective act religiously significant, according to the cited definition, has to do with the notion of sacred space, the modes of participation, and the peculiar benefits conferred by such an undertaking.

The discussion properly begins with the Commedia, not merely because of temporal priority, but because the fundamental idea of pilgrimage emerging from the work as a whole seems most consistent with the religious tradition that the text presupposes. That pilgrimage has played a significant part in the life of the medieval Christian church is too familiar to require special notice. Though the evidence for its institution in the New Testament is virtually nonexistent, a reference like that of Jesus in Matt. 23:29 to “the tombs of the prophets and … the monuments of the righteous” (see also Matt. 27:52, 53) already implies the existence of sacred sites and sanctuaries, establishments certainly familiar also in the religion of Israel.

Certain locations associated with the life and ministry of Jesus were quickly marked out as holy places of worship by the early Christians. In fact, pilgrims going to Palestine tended to regard Jesus as the first pilgrim, and his postresurrection journey to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35) was often interpreted by medieval commentators as a pilgrimage.² Again, the description of tombs opening after the death of Jesus in Matt. 27:51–53 and the rising of “many bodies of the saints” subsequent to his resurrection may exemplify the proleptic eschatology of Gemeindetheologie, but the statement may also have been colored by regard for sacred sepulchres and relics.

With the establishment of the peace of the church and the active encouragement of writers like Lady Paula and Saint Jerome, the popularity of pilgrimage grew steadily from the fourth century onward. Motivated as much by spiritual zeal as by worldly curiosity, Christians sought to visit the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem. Their ardor perhaps can best be felt through the experience of someone like the author of the Peregrinatio aetheriae (ca. 400), who sallied forth, in the words of one recent scholar, “Bible en main, utilisant le texte sacré comme un véritable guide touristique.”³ Her desire to visit the prominent locales recorded in holy writ, however, was more than a developed case of Wandertrieb. By retracing scriptural events and sites in her itinerary, and by performance of liturgies spontaneously and appropriately adapted for specific locations, she becomes personally a participant of those events and places. Her physical pilgrimage, in sum, provides the occasion for the union of salvation history and sacred geography, and the coveted trek from Egypt to Palestine is transformed into an experiential replication of both the old and new Exodus.

What broadens the significance of pilgrimages has been the particular biblical portrayal of the Christian believer as an exile and homeless wanderer. The classic text for such a notion, Heb. 11:13–16, refers to the faithful as “strangers and exiles on the earth,” people “seeking a homeland” and desiring “a better country, that is a heavenly one.” This idea has been developed both as “a homiletic topic and in expanded form as a literary plot”⁴ in countless writers across the centuries. In a deft conflation of Homeric language, Plotinian image, and Christian sentiment, Augustine, for example, exhorts in On Christian Doctrine: “Thus in this mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it.”⁵

The Christian in exile, as Jean Leclerq and others have reminded us, is in fact the dominant ideal of the Middle Ages.⁶ Not until the twelfth century does the journey emerge as the distinctive symbol of spiritual quest, and through such a development comes the rapid coalescence of the physical and the spiritual, wherein the actual journey to a specific locality—Jerusalem, Canterbury, Compostela, Rome—is also taken to mirror the meaning and process of the larger Christian pilgrimage in life. Consistent with certain strains of medieval scholasticism emphasizing the priority of mind in the human person, the upward movement of the soul is now termed, echoing the actual title of a treatise by Bonaventura, an itinerarium mentis ad Deum. Thomas Aquinas, too, has written that “we are called wayfarers by reason of our being on the way to God, who is the last end of our happiness: In this way we advance the more the nearer we get to God, who is approached ‘not by steps of the body but by affections of the soul’” (Augustine, Tractatus in Joannis evangelium 32).⁷

The emphasis in Augustine’s words quoted by Thomas concerning how the deity is to be approached is, of course, dictated by the strict spiritualism of Christian theology proper. In Dante’s Commedia, however, God is approached indeed by “steps of the body” when we witness the poet-pilgrim’s perilous descent into Hell, his strenuous climb up Mount Purgatory, and finally, his dizzying ascent into the empyrean. The physical realism of his poem, for which Dante has been justly praised through the ages, represents much more than the poet’s willful and errant departure from received doctrines occasioned by the necessary anthropomorphism of poetic art. Erich Auerbach has written perceptively that

The tale of someone embarking on a journey thus provides the most appropriate means for the poet to depict this process of transformation, since the temporal and spatial ramifications of the undertaking allow for the maximal exploitation of such dramatic ingredients as stasis and motion, trials and ordeals, reversals and delays. To show that this highly complex journey beyond the grave is at once a chronicle of the poet’s own spiritual growth and illumination and the intended guide for all mortals seeking eternal blessedness, the poet has drawn extensively on the known literatures of pilgrimage. Dante’s appropriation of that tradition, as scholarship has shown, is nothing short of massive,¹⁰ though our discussion here must of necessity be selective. It is important to note, first of all, that, although Dante at the poem’s beginning is told by Virgil to take a different path if he is to get out of the dark wood (selva oscura) in which he has lost his way (Inferno 1.91–93),¹¹ nowhere in the Inferno is there any actual indication that the poet is about to embark on a Christian pilgrimage. The awful descent into Hell may comport with Christian eschatology, but it is made for the sake of acquiring rational knowledge of the beyond, not salvific grace that heals and transforms. Allusions in Hell to pilgrims and pilgrimages are often made with enormous irony, such as the simile in Inferno 18.28–33, where the contrary movements of the panderers and seducers are likened to the bustling throng of Rome in the year of Jubilee. Symbolically, Hell is most frequently identified with Egypt, the region of luxury, worldliness, apostasy, and bondage.

Once the poet has reached Purgatory, his understanding of his journey undergoes a perceptible change. Not only does he refer to himself specifically as a novo peregrin (Purgatorio 8.4), that is, one who has entered on the first day of his pilgrimage, but throughout the rest of the poem there appear increasing concordances of details between pilgrim literature, travel literature, and even medieval cartography and the movement and landscape of the poem. By the Valley of the Princes, for example, Dante at dusk recalls the hour that stabs the new pilgrim with love, when he hears from a distance the chimes that mourn the dying day (Purgatorio 8.4–6).

It has been observed by many commentators that Mount Purgatory itself is a composite re-creation of Mount Sinai. Standing at the antipodes opposite Jerusalem with a summit touching the sphere of the moon, Purgatory with its precipitous cliffs (Purgatorio 3.46–48), circular paths and winding ridges (Purgatorio 7.70–72), narrow openings in the rocks (Purgatorio 9.74–78; 12.97), and sharply angled slopes (Purgatorio 4.40–43) powerfully recalls the topography of “The Thundering Mountain of God” depicted in scripture and in pilgrimage literature. Both mountains are symbolically linked because they provide the tangible union of Heaven and Earth for the mortals. Just as Sinai is the mountain that both the biblical Israelites and the historical Christian pilgrims must scale before they reach the promised destination of their sojourn, and just as the Law given on Sinai must precede the Grace of the Christian evangel, so the poet-pilgrim in the Commedia must go through the experience wherein his progressively felicitous ascent comes with the gradual purging of his errors and sins (Purgatorio 12.115–136).

Consonant with its religious significance and function, therefore, Purgatory is the place where the solitary wayfarer begins to acquire a deeper sense of community and communion among the redeemed. Whereas the feeling characteristic of the poet’s experience in the first book is one of loneliness and terror (Inferno 2.3: “e io sol uno”), Dante discovers early in the second book that his own experience may now be seen as part of a larger one when he and Virgil are joined by a group of visitors on the desert island before Mount Purgatory (Purgatorio 2.22ff.). Unlike those damned spirits assembled on the bank of the River Acheron and ferried to Hell by the demon Charon, wailing and traveling in isolation (Inferno 3), these some one hundred souls carried in a boat piloted by an angel are beings who, like the poet, have begun their purgatorial path to Heaven. Disembarking together, the spirits sing with one voice (“ad una voce”) the song “In exitu Israel de Aegypto,” the opening verse of Psalm 114 and the text used by Dante himself in his famous letter to Can Grande della Scala for illustrating the fourfold interpretation of redemption.

The manner in which the dead souls arrive—how they sing together in the boat, how the angel steering the boat makes the sign of the cross, how they fling themselves joyously on land, and the general sense of camaraderie and fellowship—has invited comparison with the accounts of actual pilgrim landings in the Holy Land. More significant, however, than the polysemous relations between text and events is the gentle irony structured in the encounter of the two poets with the boatload of souls. When the latter ask in excitement to be shown the way to the side of the mountain (Purgatorio 2.59–60), Virgil declines by pleading ignorance of the place, for, he says, “we are strangers even as you are” (“noi siam peregrin come voi siete” [Purgatorio 2.63]). The wordplay on peregrin, which may have the meanings of both stranger and pilgrim, is perhaps deliberately intended by Dante. As someone whose eternal destiny is confirmed in Limbo, Virgil cannot use the word peregrin to describe himself in this context except in the nonreligious sense of a sojourner in a strange and unfamiliar land. On the other hand, Virgil’s use of the first person plural noi is no poetic license, for in his company is indeed a true pilgrim, one who shares the destiny of the other redeemed souls and from whose guardianship Virgil will resign in due time.

The separation of the poet-pilgrim from his guide occurs when the travelers arrive at the top of the mountain, where Dante will have his will made “free, straight, and whole” (“libero, dritto e sano” [Purgatorio 27.140–142]) and all his past sins purged prior to his final ascent into Paradise. The drama of that moment is carefully prepared for and meticulously wrought in the final cantos of the Purgatorio. As M. H. Abrams has aptly summarized for us in his Natural Supernaturalism, the Christian notion of life as “a toilsome peregrinatio” carries with it both the image of a linear progression and a circular return. It is linear to the extent that

Along with this image of the linear journey is also the image of the circular return, epitomized in the tale of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), who collected his inheritance and “took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living” before repenting and returning to a rejoicing and forgiving father. The story has long been regarded in the Christian tradition as the supreme parable of man’s sin and redemption. In the Commedia, both figures of the linear journey and the circular return are brought into play when we witness the stages of the poet-pilgrim’s justification and sanctification.

Consistent with the theology of his poem, Dante has placed Eden, the terrestrial paradise, at the summit of Mount Purgatory and made it the first goal to be reached by the poet-pilgrim in his long and arduous quest. Since the Fall of the first couple and their expulsion from the primal garden, the human race, according to the medieval geography of the poem, has been transferred from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere, and the seat of human blessedness and first innocence has been forever barred from mortal sight (see the poet’s lament in Purgatorio 1.22–28). “The proper view of the particular and concrete shape which Dante gave to [his] journey,” as Charles Singleton’s detailed studies have shown us, is thus “a return to Eden, … a regaining of what man had lost in his fall from that lofty place.”¹³

At the dawn of the third day during their climb of Mount Purgatory, the poet-pilgrim, aware that they are near the summit, likens his feelings to those of pilgrims gladdened by the thought of their proximity to their homeland (“che tanto a’ pellegrin surgon piú grati, / quanto, tornando, albergan men lontani” [Purgatorio 27.110–111]). He is then told by Virgil that his craving for that sweet fruit (“dolce pome”) long sought by all mortals (Inferno 16.62) will on that day be satisfied (Purgatorio 27.115–117). Before Virgil leaves, he invests his companion with miter and crown, those symbols of spiritual and temporal authority on earth, and his act in turn reflects the perfection of the poet-pilgrim’s will and its achievement of mastery over itself.

The recovery of inner rectitude is not complete without spiritual cleansing and renewal. Singleton argues that there is in the final cantos of the Purgatorio a vivid portrayal of man’s restoration both to his natural perfection and to a state of grace, two conditions that find correspondence in the venerable Catholic doctrine that holds that Adam, created in God’s image, had further received from his Creator added gifts of grace.¹⁴ Whether Dante’s poetry is in fact a fastidious allegory of these notions of justitia originalis and donum superadditum is too complicated an issue to be taken up here. There is little question, nonetheless, that it is the advent of Beatrice, seen by many commentators as a type of Christ, that initiates for the pilgrim the transformation necessary to his final redemption.

Early in the poem, the intercessory role of Beatrice has already been firmly established, when Virgil discloses (Inferno 2) that it is this fair lady, prompted by Saint Lucy at the instance of the Virgin Mary herself, who descended into Limbo to enlist Virgil’s assistance for her beloved. It is she who, as Dante later exclaims in grateful retrospect, leaves her footprints in Hell in order to bring him salvation (“e che soffristi per la mia salute / in inferno lasciar le tue vestige” [Paradiso 31.80–81]). The tale of her solicitude, in fact, has helped to strengthen the Florentine bard at the commencement of his difficult journey (Inferno 2.127–133). Toward the end of the Purgatorio, the mere sight of her at once produces in Dante the powerful awakening of love, just as her eventual fierce reprimand drives him to overwhelming contrition for his past sins and errors and readies him for the ultimate visio Dei.

Critics have recognized that real affection exists between the poet-pilgrim and his childhood sweetheart.¹⁵ It is no less apparent, however, that their “old love in all its great power” (“d’antico amor sentí a gran potenza” [Purgatorio 30.39]) can never be regarded as an end in itself, for it serves, within the theological framework of the poem, as that decisive, enabling force in moving the lover to love “that Good beyond which there is nothing which man may long for” (“Per entro i mie’ disiri, / che ti menavano ad amar lo bene / di là dal non è a che s’aspiri” [Purgatorio 31.22–24]). At the summit of Mount Purgatory, after having regained entrance into the earthly Eden, Dante as the Christian pilgrim is granted the sight of “the advance of a pageant whose stately movement, banner-like lights, and holy songs have suggested to critics a procession of Church clerics bearing with them Christ in the form of the Host. The pilgrim has confessed his sins, done penance, and been cleansed by holy water. Fortified spiritually by four cardinal virtues, the pilgrim is next redeemed by Christ through reception of the Host, a ‘food which, satisfying of itself, causes thirst of itself.’ And this action brings the three theological virtues near to the pilgrim’s soul.”¹⁶

Throughout this entire episode and on to the next canto, the symbolic character of Beatrice, as the reflected image of the Divine Light, finds magnificent and sustained poetic development. In the dazzling luminosity of her eyes and her smile, the poet-pilgrim sees a double image: “As the sun in a mirror, so was shining within the twofold animal, now bearing with the one, now with the other” (“Come in lo specchio sol, non altrimenti / la doppia fiera dentro vi raggiava, / or con altri, or con altri reggimenti” [Purgatorio 31.121–123]).¹⁷ Despite this intense focus on her, her person, as Dante is careful to show, always points beyond herself. From the moment of her encounter with her lover through their final dizzying ascent toward the empyrean, her action directly inspires the action and reaction of the pilgrim. “As Beatrice looks upward, and I on her” (“Beatrice in suso, e io in lei guardava” [Paradiso 2.22]) is the characteristic pattern. The light of her gaze at the sun that then strikes into the vision of the mortal now entrusted in her care and causes him in turn to gaze upward has been compared, in a controversial line, with “a falcon which darts down and rises” or “a pilgrim who would turn homeward” (“come pellegrin che tornar vuole” [Paradiso 1.51]).¹⁸ The wordplay on pellegrin (falcon or pilgrim) again may be deliberate, since both interpretations can reinforce the meaning of her action as a double movement of descent and ascent that launches the pilgrim on his celestial path.

Of the residents in Heaven T. S. Eliot has said that “at first, they seem less distinct than the earlier unblessed people; they seem ingeniously varied but fundamentally monotonous variations of insipid blessedness.”¹⁹ Perhaps what Eliot should remember here is that he (as reader) is seeing Heaven through the vision of Dante, whose aim in the Paradiso is to depict, with all the cunning and craft he possesses, the salvific transformation of the pilgrim. The fundamental feature marking the pilgrim’s experience in Paradise, as it is beforehand, is growth—the enlargement of intellect and the intensification of love—and not immediate knowledge and clarity. When Beatrice instructs him about the souls appearing to him on the moon, the first circle of Heaven, she pointedly refers to the venerable doctrine of divine accommodation (Paradiso 4.37–43), which is utilized here for Dante’s (and by extension, the reader’s) benefit. Later she exhorts him to open his mind and keep what she has revealed to him, since there is no knowledge without retention and internalization (Paradiso 5.40–43).

The interior transformation of the pilgrim thus provides the true dynamic element in the plot; it is not the description of rank, hierarchy, and spheres, but of his progressive experience of these that unifies the action and endows it with the verisimilitude of motion and excitement. If the saints appear “less distinct than the earlier unblessed people,” as Eliot says, this is because the pilgrim’s sight has yet to adjust to the blinding intensity of celestial radiance. When at last the power of his vision has grown to such extent that it equals his station in the empyrean (Paradiso 31), the identity of the host of blessed souls becomes distinct, for they are now individually perceived. To vent that rhapsodic sense of wonder, awe, and joy that accompanies his vision at this final stage of his journey, the poetic narrator once more makes use of the images of pilgrimage. The setting of his grand epic, after all, is Easter week in the fateful year 1300. On February 22 of that year, Boniface has issued his papal bull that promises: “We … grant to all … who being truly penitent, shall confess their sins, and approach these Basilicas [of Peter and Paul] each succeeding hundredth year, not only a full and copious, but the most full pardon of all their sins.”²⁰

Dante may not have believed the efficacy of plenary indulgence in exactly this manner, and his disdain for the corruption of the Roman papacy needs no elaboration. Nonetheless, his regard for the city of Rome itself cannot be denied, for as the most celebrated and revered goal of all earthly pilgrimages, the city has become the supreme type of the final destination sought by all spiritual wayfarers. It is fitting, therefore, that when the poet-pilgrim nears his own destination, the city of the rose in Heaven, he compares his stupefaction with that of the barbarians who, approaching Rome from the north, first catch sight of the magnificent Lateran towers (“Se i barbari, … / veggendo Roma e l’ardua sua opra; / stupefaciensi, quando Laterano / a le cose mortali andò di sopra” [Paradiso 31.31–36]). Twice he likens himself to a pilgrim—as one who is renewed in the temple of his vows when he looks around and already hopes to tell how it was (Paradiso 31.43–45), and as one who has come from Croatia to stare at Saint Veronica’s veil in Rome (Paradiso 31.103–104). The object, one of the deepest veneration, was displayed at Saint Peter’s during January and in Holy Week. But Dante, as he will soon realize, need no longer be content with mere symbol or relic, just as the sacrality of place is finally assimilated entirely into the ecstasy of vision and praise. He will be granted shortly the unmediated sight of Infinite Goodness, vision greater than speech can show, and in seeing, the pilgrim has at last been brought from bondage to liberty.

The plot of the Commedia, as we have seen, is erected upon an imaginary journey that Dante, as pilgrim and narrator-participant, has taken. On the literal level of the poem, Dante at the beginning of the Inferno moves into a region beyond life, and, having descended into the realms of the lower world and then successfully scaled a mountain identified as Mount Purgatory at the antipodes with Virgil as guardian and guide, he soars from the mountain’s summit beyond the earthly sphere to the deity. In the reflected movement of this journey, a Christian pilgrim may be seen to have passed through the Egypt of the Inferno, climbed uphill over the globe to Jerusalem, which is situated at the earth’s center on Mount Zion opposite Purgatory, and then sailed from Palestine to Rome to look on Saint Veronica’s veil at Saint Peter’s. The poem, as John Demaray correctly observes, “points back to this world, but not as has been claimed to a world that is essentially secular. The pilgrimage pathway revealed here below is the most blessed that living men can tread, for it passes through the holiest lands, sites, and places in the entire iconographic Book of God’s Works. And the goal of the journey for the persevering pilgrim is a glimpse in this life of God’s Divine Visage.”²¹

When we take up The Journey to the West

(hereafter cited as Journey), a work written almost two centuries later and half a world away in China, we find remarkable instances of similarity and contrast in the two texts. Unlike the Commedia, the Chinese epic narrative is based squarely on one of the most celebrated pilgrimages in Chinese religious history, the seventeen-year (in the narrative, the span is given as fourteen) trek of the monk Xuanzang from Tang China to India to acquire Buddhist scriptures. Furthermore, although both works may be said to belong to the high comic mode in the sense that both have so-called happy endings, the Journey has a far greater abundance of low comic, indeed Chaucerian, elements of farce, ribald humor, and irreverent satires of religious and political institutions. This vast contrast in narrative tonality and character, however, should not obscure the fact that very much like the Commedia, the Journey is at once a magnificent tale of fiction and a complex allegory, in which the central drama of its protagonist’s “approach to God” unfolds within the interplay of the literal and figurative dimensions of the work.

To the extent that the story of Xuanzang is not only well known and well loved but also has received popular elaborations for nearly a millennium before it was finally worked into the form of a hundred-chapter narrative, the author of the developed Journey may be said to have found at last the formal solution most appropriate to the substance of his story. Even in dramatic form (zaju

) at an earlier stage in the history of the story’s evolution, the distinguishing feature of this early and rather unique Ming play (also entitled The Journey to the West) is its length of some forty scenes.²³ But the drama, however long, cannot equal the inherent capaciousness of a narrative in portraying the duration, magnitude, and vicissitudes of a protracted pilgrimage. In deciding to retell this familiar story in the form of the long, chapter-divided “novel” (zhanghui xiaoshuo

), then at the peak of its development and popularity, Wu Cheng’en or whoever the author might be has provided himself with sufficient length and space to incorporate not only most of the known antecedents of the tale he favors but also to add whatever details he chooses to invent.

Invention, in fact, is the most immediate distinguishing feature of the hundred-chapter work when one compares it with either its antecedents or the accounts of the historical pilgrim. For, although the actual exploits of the real Tripitaka are readily accessible in the standard dynastic history and in his biography compiled by his disciples, the operative assumptions of the novel are hardly those guiding a work of historical fiction. Not only has the author made little use of known historical materials to construct his narrative journey, but, as recent Chinese criticism has firmly established, the Sitz im Leben of the work can be found in nowhere else other than southeastern China of the sixteenth century.²⁴ Geographical details alone surfacing in the narrative would indicate that the author has virtually ignored the Record of Western Territories (Xiyu ji

), written by Xuanzang himself, and has, instead, made use of many place-names found in the Huai’an region of Jiangsu province. Such authorial manipulations of familiar sites and locations no doubt serve to incite interest in his immediate readership as well as to underscore the imaginary character of the pilgrimage itself.

This is not to say, of course, that the author of the Journey has no regard at all for the actual pilgrimage. Where appropriate, certain details are utilized with great effectiveness, as when the Tang emperor Taizong offers his “Preface to the Holy Religion” (Shengjiao xu) to the scripture-pilgrim as a gesture of imperial gratitude. Historically, this preface was bestowed by the emperor many years after Xuanzang’s return to China and after he had successfully completed the translation of the epic Yogācāryabhūmi śāstra.²⁵ In the narrative, however, the preface is orally presented by the emperor moments after the pilgrim arrives back at the capital of Chang’an, and this minor alteration not only enhances the drama of reunion between loyal subject and royal patron, but it also provides a fitting tribute to the experience and achievement of the faithful pilgrim. In this different context certain words of the preface take on a significance even greater than that of the historical document. Witness those sentences that describe the journey’s hardships: “Risking dangers he set out on a long journey, with only his staff for his companion on this solitary expedition. Snow drifts in the morning would blanket his roadway; sand storms at dusk would blot out the horizon. Over ten thousand miles of mountains and streams he proceeded, pushing aside mist and smoke. Through a thousand alternations of heat and cold he advanced amidst frost and rain” (Journey 4:421).²⁶

The sweeping rhetoric of the Tang emperor seems to have inspired the author to construct the most imaginative elaboration possible of the journey. In episode after episode we have occasion to visit with the pilgrims the most exotic haunts and fantastic locales—from a river of black water (chap. 43) to a Mountain of Flames (chaps. 59–61), from a Bramble Ridge of 800 miles (chap. 64) to a Kingdom of Women (chap. 54). Intriguing as these accounts may be, the Journey, of course, is not merely intended as literature of travel or adventure. Surely what impresses the reader are not the local sceneries and customs of the places Xuanzang visits, as might be if he were reading the historical Record of Western Territories, but the countless circumstances of duress and difficulty the pilgrim must go through, circumstances that accentuate the pains of pilgrimage, a major theme in the narrative. No one can fail to notice how often Xuanzang is buffeted by hunger, cold, thirst, and exposure. The pilgrim here is not the normal member of the Buddhist saṅgha, someone who, leaving his family (chujia), is nonetheless embraced and supported by a new community. Although he has been made a bond brother of the Tang emperor and has received a moving royal send-off in sharp contrast to the historical figure’s lowly status and furtive departure from China, the fictive Xuanzang on the road is reduced to an “in-betweener” and a pariah. He is a mendicant (xingjiao seng) who is both figuratively and literally homeless and who, because of his pilgrimage, may come into conflict even with fellow priests and clerics of his own faith in particular regions (chaps. 16, 36).

The central religious issue of the Chinese narrative, very much like that of the Commedia, has to do with personal redemption—for the master pilgrim and for his four disciples. There is, we must observe, a slight but not insignificant difference in the theological economy. Dante’s poet-pilgrim is implicated by birth in the sinful condition common to all humanity, symbolized by the selva oscura (“la vita del peccato, che ottenebra la mente,” notes one modern editor)²⁷ at the poem’s beginning from which he is to be delivered. Before he makes his final ascent, moreover, he has to confess and be cleansed of his sins committed in this life, among which those that caught Beatrice’s attention and elicited her severest reprimand were his intellectual wandering and treason in love (Purgatorio 31.58–63). The main characters in the Chinese tale, on the other hand, all suffer first because they happen to have transgressed some law of Heaven in their previous lives, and—in the case of the disciples—because they have committed further crimes even in their mortal incarnations.

If the master-pilgrim must atone for past guilt by merit attained on the pilgrimage, this obligation is just as binding on his disciples. As I have pointed out in the introduction to the narrative, “all three of them, together with dragon-horse, have been condemned for certain misdeeds. The widespread fame of Monkey stems from the turmoils he caused in heaven; Bajie, Sha Monk, and the dragon-horse were punished and exiled to the earth below for getting drunk and insulting Chang’e, the legendary beauty of the Lunar Palace, for breaking crystals during a solemn banquet, and for setting fire to the dragon king’s palace and thereby destroying some precious pearls” (Journey 1:55). Throughout the story, then, forces demonic and divine appear again and again to threaten, to tempt, and to test the five pilgrims. On numerous occasions these ordeals would involve even other humans and nonhumans the pilgrims meet on their way in such a manner that the outcome would frequently reinforce the popular notion of Buddhist karma. For unwittingly shooting with an arrow a young peacock, an offspring of Buddha’s mother, the prince of the Scarlet-Purple Kingdom later has to have his queen kidnapped for three years by a golden-haired wolf, the beast of burden of the bodhisattva Guanyin (chap. 71). For pushing some sacrificial maigre to the ground and blasphemy, the prefect of the Phoenix-Immortal Prefecture is punished with three years’ severe drought until Monkey arrives to bring relief and induces conversion (chap. 87). The cause and resolution of these various crises thus serve to illustrate the popular saying that “not even a sup or a bite is not foreordained” (Journey 2:228). As we shall learn presently in chapter 99, the predestined trials that Xuanzang must undergo have to be eighty-one, the number of perfection wrought by nine times nine. These ordeals, in fact, are meticulously recorded by the attendants of no less important a deity than Guanyin. When one ordeal is found to be lacking at the end of the pilgrimage, the goddess immediately sends one of her subordinates to “manufacture” an added one so that the cycle can be completed.

After the pilgrims have set out, it is Guanyin again who solicits secret protection from various tutelary deities for the master pilgrim. At various junctures of the journey, she delivers the needed warning and lends decisive assistance in the subjugation of monsters and demons. Though Guanyin is not romantically linked to the master pilgrim, her function in the narrative is surely comparable to the mediatorial and redemptive role assumed by Beatrice in the Commedia. When Guanyin embarks on her crucial mission to the Land of the East in chapter 8, the testimonial poem composed by the narrator refers to her as a “seeker of man” and that “to find some percipient [she] would disgorge liver and gall” (Journey 1:187). Because of her compassionate zeal and evangelical efficacy, her journey, as the narrator again predicts, will result in “a son of Buddha returning to fulfil his original vow” (Journey 1:186). When it is seen in the totality of the narrative’s design, the pilgrimage thus once more bears some interesting affinity to that in the Western poem, for the goal of both journeys is understood fundamentally as return and restoration as much as redemptive transformation.

That the notion of controlling the mind is basic to the process of self-cultivation (xiuxin

), as all students of Chinese intellectual history know, is common to many Neo-Confucian thinkers. From Zhu Xi to Wang Yangming, from Shao Yong to Luo Qinshun, Gao Panlong, and Jiao Hong, we have a continuous thread of emphasis tied to the importance of the cultivation of heart-and-mind and the elaborate variations of how this is to be achieved. In addition to the Neo-Confucian interpretation, the idea also gains prominence in the Chan (Zen) school of Buddhism, and, as Andrew Plaks has aptly observed, “the prajnaparamita wisdom condensed in the Heart (or, Mind) Sutra serves as a convenient reminder of this fact, but the same essential message might as well be drawn from nearly any other of the well-known texts of Chinese Buddhism.”²⁸ Strands of both traditions can be readily detected in the narrative, for not only is the master pilgrim shown to possess a special fondness for the Heart Sūtra (a peculiarity of Xuanzang attested by both antecedent history and popular tradition), but the narrative itself engages in constant play with such familiar and convenient metapors as “the Monkey of the Mind” and the inseparable connection between mind and Buddhahood (note the prefatory verse in Journey 1:297: “The Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is Mind; / Both Mind and Buddha are important things. / If you perceive there’s neither Mind nor Thing, / Yours is the dharmakāya of True Mind”).

Although the fictive Xuanzang is able to say at the beginning of his pilgrimage that “when the mind is active, all kinds of māra [demons] come into existence; when the mind is extinguished, all kinds of māra will be extinguished” (Journey 1:283), his experience in the narrative reveals the greatest comic irony, namely, that he is virtually ignorant of these words’ true meaning. Time and again in the course of the pilgrimage, it is his “active mind,” or the heart/mind born of fear, suspicion, doubt, mistrust, misgiving, foolishness, attentiveness to slander and flattery, and even attachment to bodily comforts that lands him in the lair of demons. Monkey, however, is the one who not only comes to his solace and assistance but also repeatedly impresses upon him the need for detachment and the truth of no-mind, a benefit that Xuanzang himself finally acknowledges (“Wukong’s interpretation is made in a speechless language. That’s true interpretation” [Journey 4:295]). The profound paradox emerging from the narrative appears to be thus: that the pilgrim, who has been given the sacred words (Heart Sūtra) and magic talisman (golden fillet and Tight Fillet Spell) wherewith to control the mind (“Mind is a Monkey—this, the truth profound” [Journey 1:168]), must be aided at all times by the mind if he is to succeed.

In view of the prominence given to the images of the mind, the temptation to read the entire narrative as a late Ming allegory on idealism with preponderant Neo-Confucian overtones is enormous. But to do so with Zhang Shushen, one of the mid-Qing editors of this narrative, is to miss a good deal of the other elements woven into the polysemous fabric of the work. We need, therefore, to recall that the Journey stresses not only the cultivation of mind but also the cultivation of the body, or the Dao (xiushen, xiudao, xiulian

). The group of images reflecting the latter process thus brings into focus the specific art of physiological alchemy.

This topic, I would like to point out, is already implied in the popular verse quoted by Monkey in chapter 85, for the Spirit Mountain mentioned three times in the poem is neither exclusively the literal abode of Buddha, the intended goal of the physical journey, nor the figurative nomenclature of the mind. In the syncretic lore of alchemy, Spirit Mountain apparently may refer to a certain spot in the human body, near to the heart according to some illustrations in Daoist texts. It is no accident that the pilgrim’s final arrival in Paradise is described in a certain order. As they reach the base of Spirit Vulture Peak, they are received into a Daoist temple with the significant name of Yuzhen, or Jade-Immortal. To reach their destination, the pilgrims are led by the Daoist temple master “through the central hall of the temple to go out the rear door. Immediately behind the temple, in fact, was the Spirit Mountain.” (Journey 4:381–382). To an untrained and uninitiated eye, this little description sounds no more than an innocent scenic description, but to the annotators of a modern edition of the text published by a Daoist society in Taiwan, the scant geographical details here offer the decisive proof that “Spirit Mountain is to be sought inside one’s body.”²⁹

Without exaggerating the importance of such incidental details, I must point out that this line of interpretation is certainly consistent with the aims and practices of neidan, or physiological alchemy. When Monkey, in one of his many autobiographical declamations in verse, recounts how he had learned the arts of immortality, his words succinctly summarize the belief accepted by all cultic masters and lay practitioners that “in my body were psychic and pills / Which one would work in vain to seek outside” (Journey 1:351). To find the elixir that could bring about a reversion to youth, an attainment of longevity because of continued rejuvenation,³⁰ one must in this view rely not on external chemicals or drugs but only on hygienic and physiological techniques. This fundamental concept, as Lu Gwei-Djen’s pioneering study has shown,

There are, as I have tried to show in my introduction, extensive patterns of correspondence between the names of the pilgrims and the Five Phases, which are then further correlated with different physiological systems or functions.³² Like Dante of the Commedia, the Chinese author has also succeeded in translating the static, mysterious vocabulary of internal alchemy into dynamic configurations of the plot. The complex system of correspondences not only enables him to comment on the experience and action of the pilgrims by allusions in the titular couplets and many of the poems structured in the narrative, but also to endow his landscape of specific regions with symbolic meaning. For example, at the beginning of chapter 44, there is the episode in which Monkey liberated some 500 hard-pressed Buddhist priests by killing two of their Daoist persecutors and smashing to pieces a heavy cart, which the priests had been forced to pull up a steep ridge. What is tantalizing is the prominence given to the cart and to the spine-ridge pass (jiguan), in both the titular couplet and the first part of the story.

To the reader unfamiliar with alchemy, the prose passage may appear no more than a rather mild attempt at naturalistic description. But to the Lungmen editors steeped in spagyrical lore, the cart seems an unmistakable allusion to heche

(river cart), which is the traditional alchemical term for either a load or measurement of medicine, or the process of reversing the flow of vital fluids in one’s body. The spine-ridge pass, according to this view, is in fact a particular spot on the spine which that process of reversal must traverse. If such an annotation by the modern allegorizer smacks too much of the “ridiculous nonsense” with which Hu Shi has charged the older editors and commentators of the narrative, one should at least take note of the striking image in numerous alchemical texts of this process: “Pulling lead and adding mercury, one transports the Great Medicine to go through the pass. The entire journey is like a cart going against the current in a river and then it will be returned to the Yellow Court

.”³³ Awareness of a passage like this may help us to understand why the author has named this particular region the Cart-Slow Kingdom. It may also conjure up the rather bizarre image of the pilgrims who, in their symbolic roles, are coursing through the human anatomy much as the diminished figures of Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage travel through the bloodstream.

If this comparison is somewhat jarring, it is because the Chinese author’s technique is so understated and unobtrusive. Readers of nearly four centuries have delighted in the narrative for its own sake, and, similar to the readership of the Commedia, not many have penetrated to “the doctrine shrouded by the strange mysterious verses” (“la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto il velame de li versi strani” [Inferno 9.62–63]). Nonetheless, the allegorical intent of the text is both insistent and inclusive, even in the scenic descriptions. An episode that relates how the pilgrims must traverse a long, narrow gorge clotted with stinking, rotted persimmons suggests a parallel with the large intestine with explicit puns (chap. 67). After the pilgrims have succeeded in conquering the Mountain of Flames more devastating and imposing than Dante’s desert of Burning Sand (Inferno 14), the narrator begins the next episode with the observation: “Since they attained the condition wherein water and fire were in perfect equilibrium, their own natures became pure and cool. Successful in their endeavor to borrow the treasure fan of pure yin, they managed to extinguish the large mountain of torrid flames.”

This process of internalizing the journey, a tendency common to many allegorical texts, may in fact point to what I would call the antipilgrimage element in this particular account of pilgrimage. While the literal action of the story, framed and governed by the historical events of Xuanzang’s travel, moves relentlessly toward a final resolution found only in the pilgrim’s reaching his geographic goal, the allegorical elements throughout the narrative actually ridicule and mock any blind trust in the efficacy of distance and externality. Sacred space, from which the ultimate benefits of the pilgrim are to derive, is actually localized and internalized. The hardships of a physical journey are progressively enlisted to reflect the vicissitudes of those who practice philosophical or alchemical self-cultivation: the restlessness of the mind, the persistency of errors, the demons of illusions and delusions, the hazards of errant techniques (note the many allusions to pangmen

[heresy or heterodoxy]), the danger of sloth and lack of concentration, and even the hubris in assuming the role of a teacher (chaps. 88–90).

It may be asked at this point why the author of the hundred-chapter narrative has chosen the processes of internal alchemy to form part of his allegory. No doubt the full answer to this question must be sought in the cultural and intellectual milieu of both author and his intended audience of late medieval China, the ascertainment of which would require research and reflection far beyond the scope of the present essay. I would maintain, however, that a provisional and preliminary answer, or a hint of an answer, may be suggested by a passing, comic touch in the work itself. We need to call to mind here that the phrase shang xitian

, or ascending the Western Heaven, means, in colloquial Chinese, “to die” or “the state of death.” That the author of the narrative is keenly aware of such meaning is to be seen in the humorous way he exploits this idiom at every opportunity. Referring to a ruler who had been dead three years but restored to life to serve the pilgrims briefly as a worker, Monkey says: “We took him on because he knew the way to the Western Heaven, having gone there himself in his younger days” (Journey 2:223). Again, a deer-monster having assumed the form of a Daoist priest is heard questioning the pilgrim: “The road to the West is shrouded in darkness! What’s so good about it?” (Journey 4:48). In the lively idiom of the vernacular that pervades this magnificent tale, Western Heaven is thus understood not merely as the coveted paradise, the abode of Tathāgata and the goal of the pilgrim. It is also very much the dreaded condition and end that await all humans, and the highly specialized pilgrimage to acquire Buddhist scriptures, seen in this light, is suddenly expanded to become the larger and universal pilgrimage of life wherein all mortals must journey toward death. If this is the case, is it too far-fetched to envision an author of such manifest learning and inventive genius deciding to depict, by means of allegory, the follies and foibles, the triumphs and defeats, not of Everyman but of those who through philosophy and cultic arts seek to transcend mortality?

The climax of the tale is reached when the pilgrims arrive at the region of the Buddha, and it is at this point that the thorough interpenetration of Buddhist and Daoist imageries becomes most pronounced. The emphasis is laid not merely on the fact that the pilgrims will succeed in acquiring the objects of their desire, Buddhist scriptures, but on the “Five Sages becoming realized immortals” (wusheng cheng zhen

), as a line of the titular couplet of chapter 100 announces. As they journey toward Spirit Vulture Peak, they are made to cross a swift torrent of water in a bottomless boat, piloted by the Conductor of Souls, the Buddha of the Light of Ratnadhvaja. In midstream, they see floating by the boat a corpse that is interpreted by the disciples and by the boatman to be the master pilgrim, and in this way, the Daoist image of “deliverance through assuming a corpselike form” (shijie

) and the Buddhist image of “casting one’s mortal shell” (tuohai

) readily coalesce.

Although culinary symbols are thus deployed in both texts, the experience of eating has different effects on the participants. Consistent with the Christian theological context of the poem, the “food” feeding the soul of Dante, the pilgrim, increases his craving for more (“l’anima mia gustava di quel cibo / che, saziando de sé, di sé asseta” [Purgatorio 31.127–128]), for the poetry here clearly paraphrases Ecclus. 24:29. There Sapientia says of herself: “He who eats of me will hunger still, he who drinks of me will thirst for more (“Qui edunt me adhuc esurient, et qui bibunt me adhuc sitient”). The viands proffered by Buddha, on the other hand, so satisfy the pilgrims, including the hoggish edacity of Bajie, that they thenceforth lose much of their desire for human nourishment (Journey 4:408, 419). The alteration of their natures thus symbolizes both the successful curbing of their mortal appetites, a Buddhist emphasis, and the pilgrims’ “perfection in the fruit of Dao” (Daoguo wancheng

), as the text declares, which will deliver them from dependence on “foods of fire and smoke” (yanhuo shi

In their well-known study of the subject of pilgrimage in Christian culture, Victor and Edith Turner have observed that “behind such journeys in Christendom lies the paradigm of the via crucis, with the added purgatorial element appropriate to fallen men. While monastic contemplatives and mystics could daily make interior salvific journeys, those in the world had to exteriorize theirs in the infrequent adventure of pilgrimage. For the majority, pilgrimage was the great liminal experience of the religious life. If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism.”³⁵ The readers of both the Commedia and The Journey to the West are fortunate to have in their hands not only marvelously conflated accounts of both journeys but also highly entertaining ones to boot.

1. Freddy Raphaël, “Le pèlerinage, approche sociologique,” in Les pèlerinages l’antiquité biblique et classique à l’occident médiéval, ed. M. Simon et al. (Paris: Geuthner, 1973), p. 12. The literature on pilgrimage in various religious cultures is enormous. For this study, I have consulted Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975); Sidney H. Heath, Pilgrim Life in the Middle Ages (Boston: Unwin, 1912), and the enlarged edition, titled In the Steps of the Pilgrims (New York: Putnam, 1950); Donald J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage (London: Routledge, 1965); Arthur Percival Newton, ed., Travel and Travellers in the Middle Ages (London: Kegan Paul, 1926); R. J. Mitchell, The Spring Voyage: The Jerusalem Pilgrimage in 1458 (London: Clarkson Potter, 1964); Thomas Wright, trans., Early Travels in Palestine (London: Bohn, 1848); Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); “Pilgrimage,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York: Scribner’s, 1921), 9:10–28; A. Fowler, “Patterns of Pilgrimage” [review article], Times Literary Supplement (November 12, 1976): 1410–1412; Nancy Falk, “To Gaze on the Sacred Traces,” History of Religions 16 (1977): 281–293; and C. E. King, “Shrines and Pilgrimages Before the Reformation,” History Today 29 (1979): 664–669. For studies dealing specifically with literature and pilgrimage, I have found the following particularly useful: W. H. Mathews, Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development (1922; repr., New York: Dover, 1970); Georg Roppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey, Norwegian Studies in English, no. 11 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1964); F. C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire: Theme and Genre in Medieval Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1971); Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 13–35; D. L. Maddox, “Pilgrimage Narrative and Meaning in Manuscripts A and L of the Vie de saint Alexis,” Romance Philology 27 (1973): 143–157; Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Ronald Paulson, “Life as Journey and as Theater: Two Eighteenth-Century Narrative Structures,” New Literary History 7 (1976): 43–58; Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). An indispensable bibliographical source on accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries will be found in Reinhold Röhricht, Bibliotheca Geographica Palestinae: Chronologisches Verzeichnis der von 333 bis 1878 verfassten Literatur über das heilige Land mit dem Versuch einen Kartographie (Berlin: Reuther, 1890), rev. ed., David H. K. Amiran (jerusalem: Universitas, 1963).

2. Herbert Thurston, The Stations of the Cross: An Account of Their History and Devotional Purpose (London: Burns & Oates, 1906), p. 3; Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 52–53; M. D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 150–151; John Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (New York: George Braziller, 1966), pl. 75; Damian J. Blaher, ed., The Little Flowers of St. Francis (New York: Dutton, 1951), p. 457.

3. Marcel Simon, “Les pèlerinages dans l’antiquité chrétienne,” in Les pèlerinages de I’antiquité biblique et classique à I’occident medieval, ed. F. Raphaël et al. (Paris: Geuthner, 1973), p. 100.

4. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 165. See also Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas of Alienation and Order,” Speculum 42 (1967): 233–259; George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper, 1962); W. G. Johnsson, “Pilgrimage Motif in the Book of Hebrews,” Journal of Biblical Literature 97 (1978): 239–251.

5. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 1.4, p. 10. Cf. Augustine’s quotation of Plotinus in The City of God, trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 9.17, p. 296. Cf. also Christine Mohrmann, Études sur le latin des Chrétiens, vol. 2, Latin Chrétien et médiéval (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1961), pp. 75ff.

6. See, for example, Dom Jean Leclerq, “Mönchtum und Peregrinatio in Frühmittelalter,” Römische Quartelschrift für Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 55 (1960): 212–225; Dom Jean Leclerq, “Monachisme et pérégrination du IXe au XIIe siècle,” Studia monastica 3 (1961): 33–52; Giles Constable, “Monachisme et pèlerinage au moyen age,” Revue historique 258 (1977): 3–27; and Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, Die asketische Heimatlosigkeit im altkirchlichen und frühmittelalterlichen Mönchtum (Tübingen: Mohr, 1930).

7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 2–2, 24.4.

8. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 94.

10. A brief review of some of the pertinent literature may conveniently be found in John G. Demaray, The Invention of Dante’s “Commedia” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 51–52. For other studies, see R. H. Lansing, “Two Similes in Dante’s Commedia: The Shipwrecked Swimmer and Elijah’s Ascent,” Romance Philology 28 (1974): 161–177; D. Heilbron, “Dante’s Gate of Dis and the Heavenly Jerusalem,” Studies in Philology 72 (1975): 167–192; G. D. Economou, “Pastoral Simile of Inferno XXIV and the Unquiet Heart of the Christian Pilgrim,” Speculum 51 (1976): 637–646; D. J. Donno, “Moral Hydrography: Dante’s Rivers,” Modern Language Notes 92 (1977): 130–139; J. C. Boswell, “Dante’s Allusions: Addenda to Toynbee,” Notes and Queries 24 (1977): 489–492; A. A. M. Paasonen, “Dante’s Firm Foot and Guittone d’Arezzo,” Romance Philology 33 (1979): 312–317; J. B. Holloway, “Semus Sumus: Joyce and Pilgrimage,” Thought 56 (1981): 212–225.

11. The Italian text of the Commedia is that of Giorgio Petrocchi’s edition published for the Società Dantesca Italiana and reprinted in C. H. Grandgent’s edition revised by Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

12. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism.

13. Charles S. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice, originally published as Dante Studies 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 224–225.

14. Ibid., pp. 101–116, 223–283.

15. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), see especially chaps. 2–3, 8–12.

16. Demaray, Dante’s “Commedia,” p. 123.

17. For the significance of the image, see Dorothy Sayers, trans., The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Cantica II: Purgatory (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), p. 321: “In the mirror of Revelation (the eyes of Beatrice), Dante sees the double Nature of the Incarnate Love—now as wholly divine, now as wholly human.”

18. on the problem of translating this passage, see Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, trans., The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Cantica III: Paradise (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), pp. 352–353.

19. T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), p. 225. For more recent treatments of the theme of development in the Paradiso, see J. Leyerle, “Rose-Wheel Design and Dante’s Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 280–308; J. L. Miller, “Three Mirrors of Dante’s Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 263–279; D. M. Murtaugh, “Figurando il paradiso: The Signs That Render Dante’s Heaven,” PMLA 90 (1975): 277–284; J. A. Mazzeo, “Dante and the Pauline Modes of Vision,” Harvard Theological Review 50 (1957): 275–306.

20. The original Latin version of the bull is found in L’anno santo del 1300: Storia e bolle pontifice da un codice del sec. XIV del Card. Stefanischi (Rome, 1900), pp. 30–31. The English translation cited comes from Herbert Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee: An Account of the History and Ceremonial of the Roman Jubilee (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1949), p. 14.

21. Demaray, Dante’s “Commedia,” p. 92.

22. Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), chap. 1; Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l’allégorie (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1970); R. H. Green, “Dante’s ‘Allegory of the Poets’ and the Medieval Tradition of Poetic Fiction,” Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 118–128; Charles S. Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove,” Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 129–135; R. H. Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s “Commedia” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969): R. H. Hollander, “Dante ‘Theologus-Poeta,’” Dante Studies 94 (1976): 192–193; J. A. Scott, “Dante’s Allegory,” Romance Philology 26 (1973): 558–591.

23. The Chinese text can be found in the Yuanqu xuan waibian

, ed. Sui Shusen

, 3 vols. (Peking, 1959), 2:633–694.

24. Su xing

, “Zhuizong Xiyouji zuozhe Wu Cheng’en nanxing kaocha baokao

,” Jilin shida xuebao

61 (1979): 78–92; Su xing, “Zhuifang Wu Cheng’en di zongji

,” Suibi congkan

3 (1979): 131–151.

25. Huili

and Yancong

, comps., Da Tang da Ciensi Sanzang fashi Zhuan

, juan 6, 10a-17b; Arthur Waley, The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952), pp. 92–95.

26. All citations are taken from my translation of the Xiyouji, Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed., The Journey to the West, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977–1983).

27. Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia, ed. G. M. Tamburini (Florence: Casa Editrice Nerbini, 1959), p. 21, n. 2.

28. Andrew H. Plaks, “Allegory in Hsi-yu chi and Hung-lou meng,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 182. For an informative account of “mind-cultivation” in late imperial China, see Judith A. Berling, The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 90–144, and Judith A. Berling, “Paths of Convergence: Interactions of Inner Alchemy Taoism and Neo-Confucianism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 6 (1979): 123–147.

29. Chen Dunfu

, ed., Xiyouji shiyi

(Taipei: Quanzhen chubanshe, 1976), p. 1150.

30. Detailed discussions of alchemical theories propounded by Chinese adepts can be found in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 5, part 4:211–323. While this volume concentrates on external and protochemical techniques, volume 5 (part 5) focuses on the physiological aspects of the art. One recent and useful study of the polysemous nature of alchemical terms is Chen Guofu

, “Daozang jing zhong waidan huanbaishu cailiao di zhengli

,” Huaxue tongbao

6 (1979): 78–87.

31. Lu Gwei-Djen, “The Inner Elixir (Nei Tan): Chinese Physiological Alchemy,” in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Joseph Needham, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 74. The term tientao [diandao]

in this regard is especially significant, since it is precisely the term employed in the very first oral “formula” uttered by Patriarch Subodhi in chap. 2 of the novel, when he taught Sun Wukong the secrets of immortality: “The Five Phases use together and in order reverse—[diandao yong] / When that’s attained, be a Buddha or immortal at will” (Journey 1.88).