Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

This statement by Hawkes is important for at least two reasons. First, the sweeping generalizations are not those of someone eager to attract attention by provocative announcements. Although in 1964 the scholarly labor for which Hawkes is now best known and praised—namely, the prodigious and masterful translation of The Story of the Stone—had yet to be undertaken, his reputation had already been firmly established five years before by the appearance of The Songs of the South, an exacting and exciting rendering of the Chuci, an anthology of probably the most difficult ancient poetry. His general description of Chinese literature, therefore, bears the authority of seasoned and scrupulous scholarship.

Second, the statement is important precisely because it represents a view that has commanded widespread assent even down to the twenty-first century. Countless thinkers, both Chinese and non-Chinese, have echoed Hawkes’s sentiments in affirming the central characteristics of the Chinese Weltanschauung to be rationalistic, this-worldly, and anthropocentric. To the extent that the dominant culture of traditional Chinese society is acknowledged to be essentially Confucian in both its organizational structures and systems of values, the particular allegiances of that class of people are regarded as pervasive and normative. In the words of Max Weber’s once influential study of Confucianism and Daoism,

Although this view of Confucianism over recent years has been challenged increasingly by the writings of such scholars as Wolfram Eberhard, Theodore de Bary, Julia Ching, Tu Weiming, Benjamin Schwartz, and others, the notion that a Confucian and thus secularist worldview predominated in traditional Chinese culture is a myth still holding sway over large segments of the academic community. If further documentation is desired, permit me to quote something of a much more recent vintage from The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, of 1984. There, Burton Watson remarks, “the Chinese poetic tradition is on the whole unusually humanistic and commonsensical in tone, seldom touching on the supernatural or indulging in extravagant flights of fancy or rhetoric.”³ The Chinese poetic world is affirmed to be both easily accessible and timeless because “it concentrates to such a large degree on concerns that are common to men and women of whatever place or time.” It has “little of the ebullient celebration of heroic deeds,” and “war and violence are seldom touched on” as are explicit erotic themes and imageries. “All of this,” according to Watson, “reflects the pervading influence of Confucianism.”⁴

The problem, however, with such a one-sided description of Chinese culture is that it simply cannot “save the appearances” nor stand up to scrutiny, particularly when we consider the data provided by literary history. It is my purpose to show here, within the confines of a brief study, some of the significant points or stages of contact that religion has made with the Chinese literary tradition. The crux of the debate in this context, I suppose, must center on what is meant by “religious inspiration,” the absence of which, according to Hawkes, is what distinguishes Chinese literature from that of the West.

As we examine the remark of Hawkes cited at the beginning, he seems to equate religion or what is religious first of all with figures, actions, and themes found in classical myths and biblical writings of the West. Thus he speaks of “Juno’s jealousy” and “Apollo’s rage,” of the “journey through Heaven and Hell,” of “Satan’s fall and Paradise Lost and Regained,” all of which, Hawkes contends, lack parallels or counterparts in Chinese literature. In making this kind of comparison, he conveniently passes over what C. T. Hsia has described as “the numberless celestial maidens and fox fairies in stories and jottings in classical Chinese,”⁵ not to mention entire pantheons of gods, immortals, chthonic deities, and weird beasts and creatures of all varieties that populate the developed novels of the late imperial period. In sheer size and complexity of hierarchical structure, those pantheons would rival any Olympian or Roman model.

My mention of the novels, of course, is entirely deliberate, for what is striking in these generalizations by Hawkes is the conspicuous absence of the genre of prose fiction, whether in the form of the short story (written in either the classical or the vernacular language) or the full-length narrative. Hawkes’s remark about early drama perhaps cannot be gainsaid, but few students of the development of Chinese prose fiction would deny that it has intimate relations with certain religious elements in the culture. Arguably, such elements might have less to do with organized institutions and articulated dogmas than with social customs, ritual practices, and unsystematized beliefs and assumptions shared by both elite and demotic levels of society. Nonetheless, the specific origin of what is customarily translated as prose fiction (xiaoshuo

), by most accounts of modern literary historians, is traceable to the mounting preoccupation, on the part of both rulers and subjects in the late Han and Six Dynasties periods, with what broadly may be described as the realm beyond nature, with such problems as immortality, the afterlife, the causal relation between merit and punishment, magic, shamanism, and alchemical theories and procedures. When one examines the intellectual and cultural history of this period, one is impressed by how cosmological speculations and historical writings both enlisted the theories of yinyang

(complementary bipolarity) and wuxing

(five phases, or multiple periodicity) to construct an unbroken set of relations obtaining in man, human society, and the universe itself.⁶ Concomitant with this tendency came the impulse to document or record the strange, the out of the ordinary—in short, to put into writing what deviates from the normal or natural occurrences in life and history.

Although scholars may dispute the thesis of Wang Yao

, a noted modern literary historian, that xiaoshuo in its earliest form was directly related to the techniques of magic or divination,⁷ they cannot deny that both the outlook and the context of early Chinese prose tales were notably colored by the beings belonging to the world of the supernatural. Gods, ghosts, animal spirits, and numinous manifestations of various kinds densely inhabited the brief tales of this period. Indeed, it was such a dominant trait that gave to this group of writings its generic name of zhiguai

(recording the strange or anomalous), but their most important feature was the fact of their independent collection. As H. C. Chang has observed, “unusual occurrences that excited wonder as events” were now regarded as “events worthy in themselves of notice—and not, as previously as part of history.”⁸ Unlike Aristotle in the West, whose rationalism might have led him to denigrate the deus ex machina, to ignore the all-important phenomenon of atē in Greek tragic drama, and to assign the element of the marvelous to the lowliest position in his enumeration of tragedy’s six qualitative parts, Chinese literati of the late Han and the Wei-Jin periods seemed to share instead the interests of Western Renaissance writers in the depiction of the marvelous. Unlike, however, theorists of the Renaissance such as Minturno, Castelvetro, Neroni, and a host of others who all insisted on pleasure as being the most important ingredient in such representation,⁹ instruction seemed clearly the more preferred purpose in the Chinese context. Tales about ghosts, about rewards and punishments in the afterlife, frequently assumed—in the words of Derk Bodde on the Soushenji

(In Search of Spirits)—“the very serious mission of proving to a skeptical world the actual existence of spirits.”¹⁰ This intent, no less than its subject matter, seems to me hardly capable of being characterized as lacking in “religious inspiration.”

If interest in the supernatural constituted at least one of the basic impulses for the writing and gathering of fiction in ancient China, such an impulse also proved to have a tenacious hold on the Chinese imagination in subsequent centuries. The very name of the form of prose fiction flourishing in the Tang period is indicative of its character: Zhuanqi

, or “a tale transmitting the marvelous.” Undeniably, the predilection for spiritual manifestations that animated four centuries of storytelling had, by the time of the Tang, become more of an established literary topos than strictly an exercise of pious zeal or religious polemics. Nonetheless, the curiosity about traffic with the transcendent world of gods, immortals, numinous beings and objects or with the world beyond the grave burned with insatiable intensity in a great number of the prose tales of the Tang and Song periods, as is evident in such extant collections as the Taiping guangji

, the Qingsuo gaoyi

, and the Yijianzhi

What might be called the religious dimension of fiction in medieval China was further enhanced and complicated by the introduction and spread of Buddhism. Although the relationship of that great religious tradition to China’s literary history has traversed such a long and complex course that a full and systematic chronicle has yet to be undertaken, at least two aspects of that relation must be briefly mentioned here. The first has to do with the origin of the idea of creative fiction in Chinese history. In his History of Chinese Vernacular Literature (Baihua wenxueshi

), of 1928, Hu Shi argued that a traditional Chinese long poem such as “Ballad of the Peacock Flying South” (Kongque dongnan fei

) was capable of only realistic narration, but it lacked the imaginative propensity to transcend nature or time and space.¹¹ In his view, the infusion of Indian culture and imaginative literature (huanxiang wenxue

) with its otherworldly (shangtian xiadi

) and utterly uninhibited (haowu jushu

) orientation exerted a “powerfully liberating” effect on traditional Chinese letters. In the field of narrative verse, such an effect resulted first in the amplification of length itself. Hu gave as an example Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddha-carita kavya sūtra

, since the verse translation of that great account of Buddha’s life and deeds, by Tanwuchen

, in pentasyllabic verse, in Hu’s estimate, was the first real long poem in China’s literary history. Its length of 46,000 characters far surpassed that of any native product.¹² In the field of prose fiction, on the other hand, the impact of Indian literature was felt in the unprecedented emphasis of “formal design and construction (xingshishang di buju yu jiegou

).”¹³ Whereas ancient fiction, inclusive of all those prose tales that purported to record the anomalous and transmit the marvelous, had always masqueraded as a form of history—however unorthodox or baseless—Indian writings, in Hu’s judgment, provided the Chinese with “a type of literature as fabricative construction (xuankong jiegou di wenxue ticai

).” In sum, the product of pure creativity is now given independent recognition and worth.

These ideas of Hu, though not without controversy, have been echoed and reinforced in later scholarship. In his study of Dunhuang literature, particularly of the bianwen, or transformation texts, Victor Mair has emphasized the important concepts of illusion (huan

, māyā) and transformation (hua

, nirmāna) and their influence on the Chinese understanding of xiaoshuo, which progressed from the notion of “small talk” in the sense of gossip, anecdote, and report of little consequence to something specifically invented or feigned. Citing another modern literary historian, Huo Shixiu

, Mair gave new and compelling endorsement to the view that only in the Tang, as a result of absorption of foreign or Indian culture, was there to be conscious literary creation.¹⁴

However one might assess this line of thinking about the origin of fiction in China, there could be no objection to the view that Buddhism provided new subject matter for fictive depiction and introduced new literary forms and speech. Anyone cursorily acquainted with its history in the Chinese context would realize that Buddhism’s arrival did not merely betoken the implantation of a novel and ever-growing body of doctrines. When seen in its first 1,000 years of development in China—say, from the late Han through the Southern Song—the Buddhist visitation must be regarded as a massive invasion of a rival cultural tradition that affected virtually every aspect of Chinese literary life. The acknowledged impact of Buddhism in this area included, for example, the manifest influence of Indic linguistic concerns in the study of phonology and the refinement of tonal metrics, the adoption of Buddhist metaphysical terminologies for the elaboration of aesthetics and poetics, the unprecedented advancement of translation and further development of the techniques of textual criticism and interpretation, and the imitation of Indian models in the rise of extended prosimetrical compositions. With the spread of this religion, doctrinal formulations (especially those treating karma and eschatology), stories about the Buddha and the vast assemblage of saints and heroes, and the exploits of eminent clerics all joined to create a vast repository of attractive topics for telling and retelling in Chinese.¹⁵

On the matter of Buddhist devotionalism, Hawkes indicated that he could find little example of its poetic manifestation apart from the “famous but not outstandingly important” verse of Han Shan, or Cold Mountain. Now, it is certainly true that both the lyrical forms of China, characteristically brief and compact, and the literati who used them were inimical to extensive and discursive incorporation of ideational elements in poetry. However, such a character of Chinese poetry does not render the lyrical forms wholly unsuitable or impervious to the expression of religious sentiments, Buddhist or otherwise. The Dunhuang literary remains, as Ren Bantang’s study and compilation have amply demonstrated,¹⁶ include among other specimens abundant poetic materials that are identifiably Buddhist. Cycles of poems with titles such as “The Twelve Hours of Chan Meditation” (“Chanmen shi’er shi”

) or “The Twelve Hours of the Law” (“Famen shi’er shi”

) clearly represent a rule of meditative ritual diurnally celebrated. In form, feeling, and artistry, such poems are worthy to be compared with poetic cycles of devotion by George Herbert and Henry Vaughn in England or Sura Dasa and Miram Bai in India.¹⁷

Beyond such exercises in explicit pietism, one must acknowledge the much more enduring and widespread view of seeing in the art of poetry itself a fundamental analogue to the Buddhist understanding of reality and existence. The emphasis on the polysemy of language, its cryptic revelatory power, and the need for enlightened intuition (wu

, jue

, or satori) advocated by Zen Buddhism finds extensive echoes and elaborations not merely in such well-known disquisitions on poetic techniques as the Canglang shihua

(early thirteenth century) or the writings of Huang Tingjian

(1045–1105). The apposite union of Zen and poetry, formalized in the line “Learning poetry is like learning to practice Zen

,” became, in fact, a sort of creedal watchword for many poets and discussions of poetics throughout the Tang and Song periods.¹⁸ Even in a canonical figure like Bo Juyi

(772–846), who might not have been identified with any one particular school of Buddhism, specific elements of that religion turn up with revealing regularity in the vast corpus of his verse.

Particularly toward the later years of Bo’s life, ritual fastings were routinely observed and extolled as an antidote for the seduction of the senses.¹⁹ A dream of partying with three deceased friends helped him recall the Buddhist teaching of “transmuting perceptual knowledge into wisdom

,”²⁰ while a vision of decay led to his realization of the axiom of nirodha.²¹ By his own admission, Bo was an avid reader of sutras and a frequent practitioner of Chan meditation.²² Moved by his good friend Yuan Zhen’s famous elegiac poems for his wife, Bo offered as a curative of grief to his good friend the Lanṅkāvatāra Sūtra

.²³ That Bo had also been a dabbler in Daoist alchemy, that he was neither a didactic zealot like Han Shan nor a pious devotionalist like some of the Dunhuang poets, actually has made his poetic affirmation of Buddhism even more striking. The simplicity of his style and diction and his complete mastery of tonal metrics have not only won for him a deservedly central place in the tradition; they also served as a powerful and effective means for the unobtrusive transmission of religious feelings and beliefs.

If we turn momentarily from Buddhism to Daoism, we may find once again specific and revealing traces not merely in the works of such poets as Xie Lingyun and Tao Qian, who were known for their Daoist sympathies and inclinations. As the scholarship of Edward Schafer and Paul Kroll has shown, Daoist notions of transcendence, cosmology, astronomy, and alchemy colored vast segments of the poetic canvas of medieval China. That such a situation has not gained widespread recognition is because few modern readers, Chinese or Western, have taken these ideas and their sources with sufficient seriousness, but they are as necessary for a proper understanding of many Tang poems and poetic practices as Lactantius, Jacob Arminius, and Hugo Grotius are necessary for Milton’s epic theodicy and Gregory the Great and Peter Comestor for Dante’s conception of purgatory. The religious underpinning of a lyric tune like the nüguanzi

and its characteristic tropes of erotic dalliance and separation or death cannot be felt without specific awareness of instances of hierogamic rites and sartorial symbolisms of the Daoist priestess.²⁴ A suite of mountain-climbing poems by Li Bo may appear to the unwary reader as works of great secular learning, given the allusions structured in the lines. However, their true meaning as that of the poet’s encounter with the numinous center of Tai Shan will not become apparent unless “their full religious context” has been restored, which in their case requires a thorough knowledge of Daoist periapts, talismans, meditative techniques, and sacred geography.²⁵

Many more examples such as these may be found in Chinese literary history, but I trust my point has been made with sufficient clarity that the vast panoply of traditional Chinese literature, far from lacking in any religious inspiration, has been touched and even transformed by various religious elements. For the rest of this essay, I turn to a brief examination of one particular work that can serve as a more intimate example of the confluence of both literary creativity and religious inspiration. This, of course, is the sixteenth-century, hundred-chapter narrative Xiyouji

(The Journey to the West [hereafter cited as JW]), most likely written by a minor official named Wu Cheng’en

As should be familiar by now, the story of the novel is loosely based on the historical exploits of the Tang priest Xuanzang

, who took seventeen years (the narrative gives fourteen years) to go to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures for his own people. Although Xuanzang was not the only Buddhist believer, Chinese or foreign, sacerdotal or lay, who had succeeded in making the long and arduous round-trip between the two countries, the peculiar circumstances surrounding the commencement of his pilgrimage in 627 (in disguise and in defiance of an imperial edict banning foreign travel at the time), the astonishing achievements both during the long trek and during the extended travels in the land of his faith, and the monumental accomplishments in translation and exegesis after his return to China all combined to make him probably the most famous Buddhist cleric in Chinese history. He was without question a master of Indian languages, having achieved such fluency that, according to his disciples’ biographical account, brigands were converted to Buddhism and rival clerics were defeated in debates by his skillful oratory. The book he wrote recording the places and peoples he visited was considered by many to be the first genuine book of geography in Chinese history. Honored by the Tang emperor Taizong for his religious and secular accomplishments, Xuanzang became a legendary hero in his own lifetime (596–664).

The novel is most significant for the topic under consideration precisely because the fundamental subject of this text is built squarely upon the person and experience of an identifiable religious figure. Whereas the plots of three other Ming works with which JW makes up what are referred to as the four monumental works of prose fiction (sida qishu

) derive from either historical material (Sanguo yanyi and in part Shuihuzhuan) or entirely from invention (Jinpingmei), the action of Journey directly concerns a famous cleric. This feature having been duly noted, it should be pointed out immediately that Journey is not a historical novel in the sense that it seeks to transcribe faithfully the journey and life of the historical priest Xuanzang. Apart from the main theme of pilgrimage in quest of Buddhist scriptures, the name of the human protagonist, and a near-verbatim citation of a royal encomium composed by the Tang emperor and bestowed upon the priest, the narrative seems to have little to do with the original event. That the real Xuanzang, traveling largely along the Silk Road, sustained appalling hardships is familiar enough to readers of his own writings and biography, but such hardships pale in ingenuity and intensity when compared with the cycles of captivity and release dramatized in the novel. The fictive Xuanzang’s own words at one point in the novel—“In mountains and streams disasters await; / My life has been the fiends’ and monsters’ bait”²⁶—may serve as an eloquent epitome of the terrible ordeals that seem to stalk every step of his way, during which fiends, demons, animal spirits, and delinquent deities of all varieties sought literally to devour him alive.

If many details surrounding the fictive priest seem to be inventions of the Ming author, building on nearly 1,000 years of storytelling and embellishment prior to the full-length narrative, this is no less true of his three disciples and the beast of burden that serve him on his journey. However one might wish to account for the origins of the familiar and appealing figures of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, it has to be recognized that they were by no means the original party of the pilgrimage, so to speak, for they were clearly the additions of the literary imagination. To assert, however, that the novelistic figures and events are lacking fundamentally in historical reference is not thereby to intimate that JW is thus devoid of or diminished in religious meaning. What I want to suggest, rather, is the intriguing paradox this narrative displays: namely, that its deviation from formal details of history acknowledged to be parts of a most celebrated chapter of Chinese religious history actually constitutes that very inventive design of the author in investing his work with a more intricate network of religious significance. That network is woven out of echoes, allusions, and symbolisms that refer not merely to a single religious tradition like Buddhism but also to the two other dominant traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. The massive appropriation and development of the teaching from the Three Religions (Sanjiao

) is what makes JW virtually a unique text in the history of the Chinese novel.²⁷

Although the fictive treatment of the priest’s birth, youth, and the public events inaugurating his pilgrimage manifestly diverges from established accounts, there are many instances in the text that indicate the author’s acquaintance indeed with Buddhist sources and ideas no less than his ingenious use of them. In chapter 93, when the pilgrims approach India, a brief conversational exchange outside the Gold-Spreading Monastery (Bujin si

) reveals this kind of authorial knowledge through the words of the human master pilgrim. “In studying the sūtras,” Xuanzang said,

In addition to this little etiological tale, incidental details traceable to explicit Buddhist writings abound in the narrative. As the essays of one student of the novel have suggested,²⁸ readers familiar with Xuanzang’s biography itself may find numerous accounts that seem to “foreshadow” certain episodes of the novel. The description of a kingdom of women and of a celestial maiden giving birth to four children after being “touched” by a water spirit (chapter 4 in the Biography) is reminiscent of chapter 53 of the novel, where the master pilgrim and Pigsy were made pregnant after drinking water found in the Kingdom of Women of Western Liang. In the brief account of Kucha

found in chapter 1 of Xuanzang’s own Record of the Great Tang Western Territories, the depiction of a dragon pool (longchi

) in which dragons are said to mate with fine mares to produce dragon-horses not only transmits a well-known motif of Hindic mythology but also recalls specifically the genealogy of the fictive Xuanzang’s beast of burden and the location of its final exaltation. Having received Buddha’s commendation for the achieved merit of “carrying the sage monk daily” on his back during his journey to the West, the horse was taken “to the Dragon-Transforming Pool at the back of the Spirit Mountain. After being pushed into the pool, the horse stretched himself, and in a little while he shed his coat, horns began to grow on his head, golden scales appeared all over his body, and silver whiskers emerged on his cheeks. His whole body shrouded in auspicious air and his four paws wrapped in hallowed clouds, he soared out of the pool and circled inside the monastery gate, on top of one of the Pillars That Support Heaven” (JW 4:426).

In the episode of the Cart-Slow Kingdom (chapter 45) where Monkey engages in a magic contest with three animal spirits masquerading as Daoist magicians, the incident of rainmaking contains elements strikingly similar to some of the stories concerning the life and activities of Amoghavajra (Bukong

), the famous Indian cleric reputed to have helped introduce Tantric Buddhism to the imperial court of the Tang. Honored as a close and powerful confidant of the imperial family under no less than three Chinese emperors—Xuanzong

(r. 712–756), Suzong

(r. 756–763), and Taizong

(r. 763–779)—Amoghavajra was made, toward the end of his life, a master of the state (guoshi

), a title, we note, that is also bestowed on the three Daoists in the novel. In Amoghavajra’s biography, preserved in the Song Gaoseng zhuan

,²⁹ it is recorded that both Xuanzang and Taizong had asked Amoghavajra to pray for rain during times of severe drought. The first time it rained so heavily that “people drowned in the markets and trees were uprooted,”³⁰ a condition of exuberant excess that might have been echoed by the effects of Monkey’s effort in rainmaking. “So great was the downpour,” according to the narrative, “that all the streets and the gulleys of the Cart-Slow Kingdom were completely flooded” (JW 2:333), and the king had to urge Monkey to stop the rain for fear of damaging the crops. The second time, when Emperor Taizong requested prayer for rain, the command came with a stipulation that Amoghavajra had to prove his “dharma power” (fali

) within three days, and the biography goes on to record that a great cloudburst did occur on the second day. Such a stipulation again recalls the entertaining episode in the novel where Monkey and his master had to demonstrate the efficaciousness of their power under specific imperial constraint of death. Indeed, in the novel, that the king had promoted Daoism and sought to destroy Buddhism was precisely motivated by the fact that Buddhist priests had failed to produce rain in a prior contest. This theme of Buddhist and Daoist rivalry, powerfully and recurrently sounded in the novel, is of course nothing alien to the long course of Chinese history. That these two religious traditions were locked in the bitterest of contests during the Tang period (particularly during the reigns of Xuanzong and Taizong) is a well-attested fact. Thus it is no surprise that the biography of Amoghavajra itself provides a few brief but entertaining details of a contest of magic between the Buddhist priest and a certain magician (shushi

) named Luo Gongyuan

,³¹ and this small but not insignificant incident might have again stimulated the Ming author’s imagination in constructing this part of his engaging tale.

Examples of such Buddhist sources for the narrative can be multiplied, but I do not think that their abundant presence constitutes the only feature that endows the work with religious significance. It is, rather, in the basic conceptualization of the master pilgrim, his disciples, and their various experiences on the pilgrimage that we can perceive the more profound and subtle influence of religious doctrines. We may recall here that the Xuanzang of history and hagiography was portrayed as a man of prodigious intelligence, courage, endurance, and resolution. For the sake of doctrinal clarification necessary to the spiritual welfare of his people, he was willing to defy death and brave the “thousand hills and ten thousand waters” to seek out and bring back those Buddhist treasures of sacred texts still unavailable to China. As all readers have noticed (usually with misgivings), on the other hand, the Xuanzang of the novel is almost an exact opposite of the historical figure in mind and character. Though he is perhaps no less tenacious than the real Tripitaka in his commitment to seek the scriptures, he shows little knowledge of the object of his quest and virtually no understanding of his own experiences.

Such a sharp contrast between the historical figure and the fictive counterpart, far from being a lapse of authorial imagination, is, I would argue, an indication of deliberate and careful design. The Xuanzang of history, as the available records show us, was determined in his efforts precisely because he had a clear vision of his goal. The long trek from China to India and back, however difficult and dangerous, was but a means to this end; it was not an end in itself. The fictive pilgrim, however, is presented in such a radically different fashion that the vicissitudes of his life, from the very moment of his conception even prior to his birth, are progressively developed by the narrative as something related in every way to his final destiny. The journey, in sum, is seen not merely as a selfless undertaking on behalf of the benighted populace of China but more importantly as a means for personal redemption or enlightenment. This understanding of the journey, as I have argued in several studies of the novel,³² is elaborated in terms of not one but all three religious traditions of China: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism.

On the Buddhist side, what is emphasized in the experience of Xuanzang and his disciples is the need of merit making through suffering, popularized in the common notion of using merit to expiate sins (jiang gong shu zui

). Specifically for Xuanzang, the journey is the ordained medium to atone for preincarnate indolence. Like Eutychus of the New Testament, who fell to his death by falling asleep during a sermon of the apostle Paul (Acts 20:9–12), so Xuanzang in a previous existence as the elder Gold Cicada was a disciple of Buddha who permitted his mind to wander (wuxin ting fojiang

) and fell asleep while the Patriarch was lecturing (JW 1:263). For such a lapse in devotion, he was banished to suffer in the human world, where the peculiar medium of his salvation included both the general hardships of a mendicant priest and the specific ordeal (eighty-one in all) of a special pilgrimage. Like their master, too, the disciples of the fictive Xuanzang, including the white horse, must also suffer in order to atone for various crimes committed in their previous existences.

Such an understanding of the journey and its ramifications are explored in nuanced variation of the main theme as the novel progresses. Because the mind in Buddhism, particularly the strongly idealistic cast of the Chan school, is regarded as both the creator of illusory experience and its chief source for illumination, the narrative has seized on this paradoxical exaltation of the mind and its proscription as one of the main devices for the construction of plot and character. In fact, this concern has enabled the author to give new twists of meaning to the well-known and hackneyed Buddhist metaphors of “the ape of the mind and the horse of the will” (xinyuan yima

) for expressing the restless, recalcitrant nature of the human intellect and affection. That the historical Xuanzang was especially fond of the prajñā-pāramitā wisdom epitomized in the so-called Heart Sūtra (Xinjing

) and found, during moments of great hardship on his journey, constant solace in its great maxims against the lures of both the senses and phenomenal distractions is firmly established by his biography and popular tradition. What the novel has done is to expand this basic theme of the monk’s particular relation to scripture by inventing the most realistic and engaging figure of Sun Wukong as the chief disciple and guardian of the master pilgrim. Consistently denominated by the narrator as Mind-Monkey (xinyuan

), Sun not only protects his master but also serves as the latter’s teacher and guide. When the human pilgrim falters under the weight of extremities or complains about his wants, it is Monkey who so prods his master’s memory on the crucial injunctions of the scriptural classic that the latter is compelled to acknowledge at one point that “the lesson of all scriptures concerns only the cultivation of the mind” (JW 4:159).

That moment of perception reached by Xuanzang, in chapter 85, is not, however, explainable in Buddhist terms alone, for as students of Chinese intellectual history well realize, the Mencian notion of nourishment or cultivation of the mind and heart (yangxin

, xiuxin

) has been a constant theme of Neo-Confucianism at least since the time of the Song, though its real beginning might have started as early as the Tang.³³ Joining this notion to the concept of the cultivation of the self (xiushen

), a key phrase that the Book of Great Learning of classical Confucianism regards as foundational to the action of the sage—centrifugally conceived—to put in order the family, govern the state, and pacify the world (qijia, zhiguo, ping tianxia

), Neo-Confucians have repeatedly urged the cleansing (qingxin

) and rectification of the mind and heart (zhengxin

) in the double sense of “not letting heterodox and superficial notions gain entry”³⁴ and concentrating on the essential truths with utter attentiveness. This emphasis receives succinct articulation in the writings of Zhou Dunyi

(1017–1073):

For the readers of The Journey to the West, such an exhortation to singlemindedness or oneness might well have been the basis for a hilarious and exciting episode in the narrative in which Sun Wukong and his double cause great disturbance in the entire cosmos because no power therein can tell them apart. Only Buddha at last possesses the requisite might of discernment to separate the true Monkey from its false image, the six-eared macaque of chapter 58. As the two simian figures fight their way up to the Western Paradise, we can hear these words of Buddha addressing his congregation: “You are all of one mind, but take a look at two Minds in conflict arriving here.” The narrator, too, specifically offers this comment:

I cite this poetic commentary deliberately, for although the penultimate line makes homily of a Buddhist commonplace, the language of the last line decisively illustrates how a motif of another religious tradition can be introduced effortlessly in the narrative texture. This is, of course, the tradition of Daoist alchemy, for the phrase “holy babe” betokens the crucial state of realized immortality when the “inner elixir,” or enchymoma, is achieved. As Joseph Needham and his colleagues have made clear in their monumental study of the history of Chinese science, the theories and praxis of alchemy were “born within the bosom of the Daoist religion.” Whether it is practiced in its external mode (waidan

) with the aid of chemical, metallurgical, and herbal substances, or in its internal mode (neidan

) with the galvanization of physiological elements and processes, Chinese alchemy has always had as its goal “the induction of material immortality.”³⁶ This emphasis on the prolongation of physical life, in fact, ultimately distinguishes it from its Indian or Western counterparts, despite many parallels in both ideas and techniques.

That the novel has made massive use of the language and rhetoric of physiological alchemy has been recognized from the earliest Qing editors and commentators of the narrative down to the present sponsors of a new Daoist edition of the novel in Taiwan.³⁷ In my own translation of the novel, I have tried to track down many sources for the references to historical spagyrical literature, and this effort has been augmented significantly by a series of five long essays by Liu Ts’un-yan (Cunren) of 1985.³⁸ By providing us with detailed examples of the novel’s appropriation from the writings of one particular Daoist community, the Quanzhen

, or Perfection of Authenticity school, Liu’s research has perhaps lent new credence to the insistent claim by both Qing and contemporary Daoists that the novel was not the work of a Ming author but that of Qiu Chuji

the grand patriarch of the sect and a known alchemist who flourished in the Yuan period (1148–1227). The matter of authorship, in my judgment, is still too controversial to be settled, but Liu’s studies have rendered incontrovertible the fictive author’s intimate familiarity with the ideas associated with Wang Zhe

(1112–1170), founder of the sect, Ma Danyang

(1123–1184), his chosen successor, and their descended disciples. The interpretive questions necessarily attendant to the study of the novel thus must take up the reason for its use of alchemy and how the spagyrical concepts and configurations are deployed.

Because I have covered some of the ground already in other studies, I make only a few brief observations here. Concerning the why of alchemy, it should be pointed out first of all that this motif is, in the history of the novel’s development, clearly an aspect peculiar to the narrative presentation of the story. If, for example, one examines the long dramatic version of the Xiyouji most likely preceding the extant version of the hundred-chapter novel, one can discover many incidental and characterological similarities, but the drama version shows no hint whatever of allegorization by reference to alchemy. It is the narrative author who has elected to confer on his grandly conceived tale an additional dimension of meaning by enlisting the routes and structures of inner elixir. To the Buddhist notion of salvation or enlightenment and the Neo-Confucian rectification of the mind, the author now further posits immortality as the distinct goal of the pilgrimage. The Quanzhen notion of achieving physical longevity, conveniently summarized by David Hawkes in his study of its dramas, is that the adepts of this particular school

Readers of The Journey to the West will recognize at once that this process of the inner elixir invariably constitutes the main theme of the disciples’ autobiographical speeches that stud the narrative. Always uttered in the highly rhythmic form of the pailü with resounding end rhymes, these poetic declarations give a vivid and dramatic account of how Sun Wukong, Zhu Wuneng, and Sha Wujing had struggled to attain the lofty status of a xian

, or realized immortal endowed with magical powers. It is their elevation from the humble condition of a beast (Monkey) or a human mortal (Pigsy, Sandy) to that of a supernatural being by means of arduous self-cultivation that qualifies them to serve not merely as the pilgrim’s guardians but occasionally also as his guide in alchemy. Just as Sun has sought in various instances to assist his master in understanding the true meaning of detachment enshrined in the Buddhist Heart Sūtra, so both Monkey and Sha Monk, in chapter 36, become their master’s tutors in physiological alchemy by using the latter’s human homesickness under a bright moon as his induction into the deeper internal mysteries. In the symmetry of a skillfully crafted episode, the pilgrim’s poetic eulogy to the moon, characteristically filled with conventional conceits and historical allusions, is answered by his eldest disciple’s observation that “the moon may symbolize the rules and regulations of nature’s many modes and forms” (JW 2:176). The lesson that follows, expounded by both Zhu and Sha and complete with poetic citation (with minor emendation) from the great spagyrical text of the Song the Wuzhenpian

(Poetical Essay on the Primary Vitalities), by Zhang Boduan

, combines alchemical ideas found in such a classical text as the Cantongqi

(The Kinship of the Three), by Wei Boyang

(ca. 142), and in Quanzhen literature. The images of the moon’s waxing and waning, embodied in the expressions of rising crescent and lowering crescent (shangxian

, xiaxian

), are taken to mirror the accession and recession of the yin-yang forces alternately obtaining in the cosmos and in the human body. Such a movement, conveniently symbolized by strokes of certain trigrams enshrined in the Classic of Change, is further correlated with the interactive process of chemical substances such as lead and mercury, which are themselves also allegorical signs of various bodily fluids or vital breaths (qi

) of the viscera. Needham’s explanation, “hence the veiled usage of ‘two eight-ounce amounts of lead and mercury (er ba liang)’; a secret way of referring to the lunar quarters (two eight-day intervals),”⁴⁰ provides an illuminating gloss on Su Wukong’s injunction to his master: “If we can nourish the Two Eights until we reach the perfection of Nine Times Nine, then it will be simple for us at that moment to see Buddha, and simple also for us to return home” (JW 2:177).

In the rich polysemy of this narrative, even the simple word “home” in this context (here, literally “old” or “former fields” [gutian

]) means more than its secular designation of China, for which the human pilgrim is depicted to have continuous longing. Since he and his disciples are all, in one way or another, delinquents from a prior celestial existence, their journey to see Buddha, fraught with redemptive suffering, is fittingly presented in the narrative as a homeward journey. Whereas China remains indisputably the true home of the historical pilgrim, the fictive narrative continuously emphasizes instead that for the elder Gold Cicada to reach the Western Paradise is for this former son of Buddha to arrive at his true abode. Moreover, his homecoming (note the phrase huanxiang

, used by Tripitaka in the poem he composed in chapter 23 [JW 1:451] extolling the merit of the life of the pravaj) is also conveniently blended in the narrative with that understanding of Buddhist enlightenment as the recovery of one’s original nature (benxing

), identical with the Buddha-nature within, through the illumination of the mind (mingxin jianxing

). So understood, this motif of return is, appropriately enough, regarded by the author also as one possessing profound resonance and easily exploitable for depicting the process of alchemy.

“There is no single key to physiological alchemy,” according to Needham, “more than the idea of retracing one’s steps along the road of bodily decay.”⁴¹ Ever since the time of the Daodejing, the Daoist has been keenly interested in the phenomena of birth and death. In the familiar maxims gathered in chapter 16 of this classic:

For the physiological alchemist, however, his quest is a different knowledge and a different kind of permanence. To attain his goal, his is an attempt to reverse the natural course of nature, and this is why his writings make constant reference to such concepts as huan

and fan

(regeneration and reversion), xiu

(restoration), xiubu

(repair, replenishment), and fu

(return, restore, recover). The fundamental thrust of this belief, according to Needham, is instrumental to the rise of two other sets of ideas explanatory of such alchemical techniques:

Such a complex of ideas may seem intolerably arcane to the modern reader, though Needham tries to make them more acceptable with scientific comparisons. When, however, these abstractions are noted in the engaging and exciting context of the novel, they help to illumine both the larger meaning of certain episodes and the author’s inventive ingenuity. It is within the schema of alchemical allegory that the pilgrims achieve their furthest reach of significance, for they themselves have become the actants or agents of the elixir process. Through an intricate system of nominal correspondences, the master pilgrim and his disciples are first correlated with the cycles of the five phases and then with visceral functions and secretions. Their experiences on the journey, so entertainingly recounted on the surface of the narrative as repeated battles with demons, monsters, and renegade deities of all varieties, also chronicle the hazards and vicissitudes of the Daoist adept: the recurrent failures and partial triumphs, the constant fight against mental and bodily distractions, and the life-threatening danger of errant techniques. Furthermore, their very persons and experiences dramatize the action and reaction of alchemical forces, in such a way that regional topography takes on anatomical features. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a narrow mountain gorge filled with rotted persimmons is explicitly likened (with a verbal pun) to a section of the human colon⁴⁴ (chap. 67), and the pumping of testicular fluids up the spine by means of the “river chariot” or “water-raising machine” (heche

, which one spagyrical text describes as “like sailing a boat against the current” [ru nishui xingzhou

])⁴⁵ undoubtedly has generated the episode of the Cart-Slow Kingdom located in a region significantly named Spine-Ridge Pass (chap. 44). The way by which the external pilgrimage to fetch Buddhist scriptures is transformed into an internal journey to achieve the formation of the enchymoma justifies in great part the sentiment of those readers who saw in the narrative “a step-by-step enactment of the Quanzhen technique

.”⁴⁶

I close with a brief consideration of three questions, the first being, is the allegory necessary? If one means by this whether there is any reason intrinsic to the tale of a scripture-seeking pilgrimage that requires allegorical depiction, the answer would likely be negative. But if one means by the question whether our understanding of the text demands our taking the allegorical elements seriously, my reply would be firmly in the affirmative. Far from being destroyed by “centuries of meddling from Daoists and Buddhists,” as Hu Shi has said of the novel’s editors and commentators,⁴⁷ the work itself makes constant demand of its readers to heed the many levels of nonliteral meaning structured therein.⁴⁸ A feature such as why Sha Monk alone of the four disciples is portrayed as never having either the need or the ability to transform himself is one that no principle of realistic fiction is adequate to explain. External knowledge and references must come to aid in our attempt to decipher intentionality and meaning.⁴⁹

My second question concerns closure. Because of the marked tendency toward episodic repetitions in the narrative, Andrew Plaks, in The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel, has considered the ending of JW to be somewhat anticlimactic. The pilgrims seem to have undergone little change, and their arrival at their long-sought destination is described in a manner reminiscent of their many previous occasions of straying or wandering. Does this understated denouement suggest that the pilgrims are going nowhere, that their final goal is as illusory as some of the demonic manifestations encountered on the way? Such a view of the novel’s ending, though not without merit, must in my view be balanced by our awareness of other textual features. Since the plot of the novel, however deviant from history, nonetheless takes the historical pilgrimage as its frame, it can do little to alter the success of Xuanzang in his quest or his triumphant return to his native land. A certain sense of closure, in other words, is dictated by the given telos of the authorizing source.

One of the striking features of the last three chapters of the novel, however, has to do precisely with the ironic manner wherewith the pilgrims’ success is depicted. It seems that salvation or enlightenment has stolen upon them unaware. As always, it was Monkey who possessed the perspicacity of vision to discover that they had arrived at their goal, and the blindness of his companions had to be removed by his admonition: “Master, you insisted on bowing down even in a specious region, before false images of Buddha. Today you have arrived at a true region with real images of Buddha, and you still haven’t dismounted. What’s your excuse?” (JW 4:380).

At the threshold of their deliverance from the “old selves” (literally, original carcasses [benhai

]) with the crossing of the Cloud-Transcending Stream in a bottomless boat, Zhu Bajie, Sha Monk, and the human pilgrim continue to exhibit the sort of comic timorousness and blindness consistent with the characterization throughout the narrative. Even after their meeting with Buddha, when participation in a celestial banquet at long last granted the pilgrims “longevity and health” and enabled them “to transform their mortal substance into immortal flesh and bones,” the full significance of their achievement still escaped them. It was only after they had been stranded once more on earth during their journey back to the Chinese capital, when the forgetfulness of Xuanzang to fill a request of an aged turtle landed the entire entourage in a river, that they reached finally a proper understanding of their acquisition. This little mishap, which caused some loose, dampened pages of the acquired scriptures to stick to the boulders by the shore, again might have derived from the Biography of Xuanzang himself.⁵⁰ But its true meaning was expounded by Sun Wukong to his frightened companions as they huddled to protect their treasures from marauding demons of the night:

“Only then did Tripitaka, Bajie, and Sha Monk realize what had taken place,” added the narrator, “and they all thanked Pilgrim repeatedly.” However it is to be conceived, transcendence is attained not merely by the pilgrims’ success in acquiring the scriptures, but that very act of acquisition has also been made a metaphor for their realization of immortality (chengzhen

If my argument thus far has succeeded in demonstrating the large presence of religion in the text, there remains the third and final question that has often been asked of such an interpretation: how is religion compatible with the biting satire and exuberant humor that enliven virtually every page of the marvelous work? The underlying assumption, of course, is that religion is serious business, much too solemn and heavy a shroud to cloak a narrative of such vitality and ribald fun. To answer this question properly, I realize, would require another essay of equal length. I can only point to how this problem may be addressed.

I begin with the acknowledgment that, although The Journey to the West shares certain common motifs and characteristics with such great religious allegories of the West as the Faerie Queene, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Commedia, it lacks the severe gravitas of the Bunyan text or the rhapsodic vision of Dante’s mighty canticle. When the Chinese narrative is compared with monuments of Western literature, the works that most readily come to mind are those by Chaucer, Rabelais, and Swift. The achievement of high comedy and satire on the part of the Ming author cannot be slighted or denied, and Zhu Bajie, who is a sort of Falstaff, Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza all rolled into one, is arguably the comic figure without rival in traditional Chinese literature. His sensuality, sloth, and hoggish appetite have delighted centuries of readers. So, too, have the daring antics of an obstreperous ape who pisses on the Buddha’s middle finger, consigns the icons of the Daoist Trinity to the privy, and tricks their unwary disciples into drinking his own urine by passing it for “holy water.” How could a text of such manifest irreverence be considered in some sense religious?

My reply would be that it all depends on what kind of religion is in view. Although Judaism, beyond the Hebrew scriptures, possesses a wealthy tradition of jokes, folk wit, and even unbridled humor, the Christian religion is at once more earnest and subdued—at least insofar as its character is to be adduced from its canonical documents.⁵¹ The verb “smile” (meidao) never occurs in the New Testament, and the words “laugh” and “laughter” (gelao and cognates) appear only in the context of derision (e.g., Matt. 9:24) or as generic contrasts to an activity like weeping (Luke 6:21, 25; James 4:9). Instances of mockery or scorn do turn up in the letters of Paul, but they are used as instruments of fierce polemics.

When we come to the Chinese context, we note that Confucianism, too, is a tradition of solemnity and high seriousness, and the master’s fastidious deportment is to be seen in the report that he “never laughed unless he was happy” (Analects 14.13). Only rarely has it been recorded that “he broke into a smile” (Analects 17.4). For Daoism, by contrast, the dialogues and anecdotes collected in the Zhuangzi point to the enlistment of outrageous wit and wry humor in the service of serious philosophical discussion. In the history of Chinese religions, however, it is undoubtedly Buddhism that offers the most obvious example of how jest and facetiousness can cohabit with truth. Particularly in the enigmatic behavior and utterance of the Zen masters, the ridiculous, the farcical, the non sequitur, and even slapstick may function as inducement to awakening. When one reads the various recorded sayings of the Zen masters, one cannot but be impressed by how frequently laughter interposes with speech, for laughter in this milieu often denotes the sudden advent of insight. In their recourse to riddles, jokes, and absurd reasonings, the patriarchs are attempting to help their interlocutors see at once the paradoxical nature of truth and the stubborn, tenacious trap of profane rationality. Humor, together with such physical impudence as shoutings and beatings, must join to shock us out of our complacent entertainment of illusions. It is this spirit of iconoclasm that begets the extreme but famous injunction to “jeer the patriarchs and abuse the Buddhas

” or even to kill the World-Honored One “with one stroke of the rod and feed him to the dogs

.”⁵²

Given this tradition where “even the most sacred moments of Zen experience are not exempt from comic profanation and the humbling qualifications of humor,” for in Zen iconoclasm, “the relationship between the sacred and the comic is really the same as in all polarities that stand in dialectical relationship,”⁵³ it is not surprising that some traditional readers and commentators have admired The Journey to the West for its marvelous fusion of the holy and the comic. Monkey’s encounter with his first teacher from whom he acquired his enormous magic powers and the secret of longevity, reported in chapter 2, patently imitates and parodies the Zen “cases” (gongan

) with their rapid-fire dialogues and witty exchanges between mentor and pupil. Once he had broken the riddle posed by the Patriarch Subodhi (JW 1:86), Monkey throughout the novel made a consistent display of such cunning, skill, and resourcefulness that new meaning would be added to the proverbial “ability to do as vicissitudes demand” (suiji yingbian

) or “to meet plot with plot” (jiangji jiuji

[JW 1:362]). Faced with the formidable weapons of a magic gourd and jade vase (in actuality the purloined treasures of Laozi), which could reduce someone sucked inside to pus “in one and three-quarter hours” (chap. 33), Monkey played the supreme con man and wangled these instruments from their monster owners by promising them a specious gourd that could even store up Heaven. Threatened by a decree of the Dharma-Destroying King, who vowed to kill 10,000 Buddhist priests in one lifetime (chap. 84), Monkey had the presence of mind to bring both ruler and subjects to heel and penitence by secretly shaving all of them bald during the night.

This novelistic conception of Monkey’s alert and adaptive intelligence is not without enormous significance, for as Bernard Faure has observed, “the stress on upaya (jap. Hoben

) or skillful means, … reminds us of something that the Western tradition has neglected since it chose Platonician idealism against the practical wisdom or mètis of the early Greeks. The Zen ideal type (Han-shan, Pu-tai), like Odysseus, is a kind of trickster, fond of riddles and always ready to seize the opportunity.”⁵⁴ Much more than these illustrious figures of Zen history and hagiography, Monkey can be seen as a type of the trickster par excellence. In himself he embodies that fascinating union of contraries—Promethian daring and clownish prankishness, single-minded devotion and restless irreverence, penetrating perception and blinding passion—characteristic of the figure familiar in many mythologies of the world. “Humble braggadocio, gamy holiness, sacred profanity—these are the ironies that the trickster challenges us to understand.”⁵⁵

An episode like chapter 14, in which Monkey was punished for slaying the Six Robbers, is manifestly built upon the well-known dialogue between Zen master and disciple preserved in the Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Benji of Mount Cao

. The profound irony of the incident stems from the fact that, whereas the human priest has but a literalistic understanding of the prohibition of killing, Monkey is the one who grasps adequately the paradoxical truth of showing compassion by “slaying the Six Robbers with one sweep of the sword

.”⁵⁶ The didactic intent of the episode, so engagingly served by the lively allegory, might well have been one of the many textual features that led Liu Yiming to the observation: “The rhetoric of The Journey to the West is quite similar to the mysteries of Zen. The real message completely transcends the actual words of the text. Sometimes it is hidden in vulgar or ordinary language, sometimes it is conveyed through [the description] of the terrain and the characters. Sometimes the truth and perversity are distinguished from each other through a joke or a jest; sometimes the real is set off from the false in the space of a word or phrase.”⁵⁷ The novel succeeds as a comic allegory precisely because its narrative texture and inventive design allow for the affirmation of certain truths of the Three Religions to be made right alongside hilarious jibes at “worthless monks and impotent Daoists

”(JW 1:370).

At the beginning of the novel, when Monkey steals into the chamber of his adept-teacher to learn the arcane arts of immortality, he is greeted first by these words of the Patriarch Subodhi:

6. The literature on the development of dualistic and correlative thinking in ancient China is enormous. For a succinct discussion, see Xu Fuguan

, “Yinyang wuxing zhi qi youguan wenxian di yanjiu

,” in Zhongguo sixiangshi lunji xubian

(Taipei: Shibao chuban songsi, 1982), pp. 41–111. See also Henry Rosemont Jr., ed., Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology, Journal of the American Academy of Religion Studies 50, no. 2 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984); Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 9. On correlative thinking and its impact on Chinese narrative, see Andrew H. Plaks, “Conceptual Models in Chinese Narrative Theory,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 4 (1977): 25–47.

7. Wang Yao

,” Xiaoshuo yu fangshu

,” in Zhongguwenxue sixiang

(Shanghai: Tangdi chubanshe, 1951), pp. 153–194. For further studies of magic, magicians, and their relation to literary history, see Lu Xun

, “Zhongguo xiaoshuo di lishi di bianqian

,” in Lu Xun quanji

(Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 9:301–312; Ngo Van Xuyet, Divination, magie et politique dans la Chine ancienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976); Kenneth J. DeWoskin, Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies of Fang-shih (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Wang Guoliang

, WeiJin nanbei chao zhiguai xiaoshuo yanjiu

(Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1984). On the rise of prose fiction in general, see Henri Maspero, “Le roman historique dans la litérature chinoise de l’antiquité,” Mélanges posthumes sur les religions et l’ histoire de la Chine (Paris: Civilisations du Sud, 1950), 3:55–62; Ni Hao-shih

[William B. Nienhauser Jr.], “Zhongguo xiaoshuo di qiyuan

,” Gudian wenxu

7 (August 1985): 919–941.

10. Derk Bodde, “Some Chinese Tales of the Supernatural: Kan Pao and His Sou-shen chi,” first published in 1942 and reprinted in Essays on Chinese Civilization, ed. Charles Le Blanc and Dorothy Borei (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 334. See also Karl S. Y. Kao, ed., Classic Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), and Anthony C. Yu, “‘Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!’ Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Prose Fiction,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (December 1987): 397–434 (see chap. 10, the present volume).

15. For a convenient but brief survey of Buddhist influence on Chinese literature, see Jan Yün-hua, “Buddhist Literature,” in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 1–12. See also Zheng Zhenduo

, “Foqu yu bianwen

,” and “Foqu xulu

,” in Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu

(1957; repr., Hong Kong: Guwen shuju, 1970), 3:1066–1067, 1068–1101; Jaroslav Průšek, “The Narrators of Buddhist Scriptures and Religious Tales in the Sung Period,” and “Researches into the Beginnings of the Chinese Popular Novel, I–II,” in Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1970), pp. 214–227, 228–302; V. Hrdlicková, “The First Translations of Buddhist Sutras in Chinese Literature and Their Place in the Development of Storytelling,” Archiv Orientální 26 (1958): 114–144; Paul Demiéville, “La pénétration du bouddhisme dans la tradition philosophique chinoise,” “Le bouddhisme chinois,” and “Le Tch’an et la poésie chinoise,” in Choix d’ études bouddhiques (Leiden: Brill, 1973), pp. 241–260, 365–435, 436–455; Paul Demiéville, “Les début de la littérature en chinois vulgaire,” and “Tch’an et poésie,” in Choix d’ études sinologiques (Leiden: Brill, 1973), pp. 121–129, 322–329; Chen Yinque

, “Sisheng sanwen

,” in Chen Yinque xiansheng wenshi lunji

(Hong Kong: Wenwen chubanshe, 1973), 1:205–218; Zhang Mantao

, ed., Xiandai Fojiao xueshu congkan

, vol. 19, Fojiao yu Zhongguo wenxue

, and vol. 38, Fodian fanyi shi

(Taipei: Dasheng wenhua chubanshe, 1976–1979); Sawada Mizuho

, Bukkyō to Chūgoku bungaku

(Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1975); Hirano Kenshō

, Tōdai bungaku to bukkyō no kenkyū

(Kyoto: Hōyū shoten, 1978); Shi Lei

,” Wenxin diaolong” yu FoRu erjiao yili lunji

(Hong Kong: Yunzai shuwu, 1977); Kaji Tetsujō

, Chūgoku bukkyō bungaku kenkyū

(Kyoto: Kōyasan Daigaku Bunkagaku Chūgoku Tetsugaku Kenkyūshitsu, 1979); Sun Jingyao, “The Name of the Game: The Term ‘Comparative’ and Its Equivalents in the Context of Chinese Literary History,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 33 (1984): 59–62; Kang-i Sun Chang, Six Dynasties Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 117–120.

27. The only other novel I know of that is comparable in scope and magnitude in utilizing elements of the sanjiao for novelistic exposition and enactment is the Sanjiao kaimi guizheng yanyi

, a text as yet unavailable for circulation since the only extant copy is preserved in the Tenri University library (Japan). See the pioneering and splendid study by Judith A. Berling, “Religion and Popular Culture: The Management of Moral Capital in The Romance of the Three Teachings,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 188–218. According to Berling, this novel is manifestly influenced by, among other works, The Journey to the West, but its didactic intent seems even stronger than that of its antecedent. For a recent and important study of certain ethical aspects of two major novels of the sixteenth century (The Journey to the West and Fengshen yanyi

), see Rob Campany, “Cosmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese Novels,” Journal of Religious Ethics 14, no. 1 (spring 1986): 81–112.

28. Cao Shibang

,“Xiyouji zhong ruogan qingjie benyuan di tantao

,” Zhungguo xueren

1 (March 1970): 99–104; “Zaitan

,” Youshi yuekan

41, no. 3 (March 1975): 32–37; “Santan

,” Youshi xuezhi

16, no. 3 (December 1980): 197–210; “Sitan

,” Shumu jikan

15, no. 3 (December 1981): 117–126; “Wutan

,” ibid., 16, no. 4 (March 1983): 35–43; “Liutan

,” ibid., 17, no. 2 (September 1983): 36–45; “Qitan

,” ibid., 19, no. 1 (June 1985): 3–13. My brief discussion of Buddhist sources here owes in part to Cao’s suggestions, but many of his identifications seem to me to be rather far-fetched.

33. Most scholars studying this theme see in Zhu Xi

(1130–1200) the beginning of a new Orthodoxy. See, for example, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). But according to the recent study by Yü Ying-shih [Yu Yingshi]

, Han Yu

, in “Yuan Dao

,” is already advocating the theme of the mind’s governance

, an emphasis traceable to the ascending impact of Zen Buddhism. See Yü Ying-shih, “Rujia sixiang yu jingji fazhan

,” The Chinese Intellectual

, no. 2 (1986): 3–45, esp. pp. 6–9, 14–16. See also Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 93–99, 159–166. On the Zen notion of mind as another name for Buddha (

) and the territory of mind as the equivalent to Buddha nature (

), see Jing [Ying] de chuandeng lu

(SBCK ed.), juan 9, 13b; juan 13, 13.

51. The subject of humor in religion has yet to receive its due attention in scholarship. For general discussions, see Reinhold Niebuhr, “Humour and Faith,” in Discerning the Signs of the Times (New York: Scribner’s, 1946); M. Conrad Hyers, ed., Holy Laughter (New York: Seabury Press, 1969); Helmut Thielicke, Das Lachen der Heiligen und Narren (Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.: Herder, 1974); Robert A. Kantra, All Things Vain: Religious Satirists and Their Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984). For Jewish humor, see Shmuel Avidor, Touching Heaven, Touching Earth: Hassidic Humor and Wit (Tel Aviv: Sadan Publishing, 1976); Henry D. Spalding, comp., Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor: From Biblical Times to the Modern Age (New York: Jonathan David, 1975); Judith Stora-Sandor, L’ humour juif dans la littérature de Job à Woody Allen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984). The last title contains an extensive bibliography. For Christian humor, see Martin Grotjahn, Beyond Laughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957); D. Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).