Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

AS A WORK of comic fantasy, Journey to the West (Xi yu ji) is readily accessible to the Western imagination, as witness the popularity of Arthur Waley’s abridged version, Monkey, with the general public and especially with the college audience. But Waley has chosen to present only a few of the forty-odd adventures in the latter half of the book; translated in their entirety, many of the episodes may seem tiresome to the Western reader as repetitious in character. Even so, he will find it a civilized and humane book and one, moreover, that meets his expectation of what a novel of comic adventure should be. Though, like Three Kingdoms (San guo) and Water Margin (Shui hu), the Journey is crowded with characters and episodes, its design of a journey makes it inevitable that the pilgrims are the objects of continual attention while the assorted gods, monsters, and human characters they meet on the road claim only secondary interest. And its author, Wu Chengen, though he also builds upon an earlier, simpler version of the story, proves his originality precisely in his subordination of story as such to the larger considerations of theme and character and in his firm comic portrayal of the main pilgrims—Tripitaka, Monkey, and Pigsy. The last two, especially, are fully as memorable as another pair of complementary characters famed in world literature: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. As a satiric fantasy grounded in realistic observation and philosophical wisdom, the Journey does suggest Don Quixote-— two works of comparable importance in the respective developments of Chinese and European fiction.

Ever since Hu Shi published his pioneer study of the novel in 1923, the authorship of the hundred-chapter Journey has by general scholarly agreement been assigned to Wu Cheng-en (c. 1506–1582), a native of Shan-yang xian, Huai-an fu (in present-day northern Jiangsu), who enjoyed a reputation among his friends for wit and literary talent. None of the premodern editions of Journey, however, bear his name as author or compiler, and Glen Dudbridge has recently questioned the slim documentary basis for this attribution. It is highly unlikely, however, that anyone will come up with a stronger candidate, and all circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that Wu Cheng-en possessed the necessary leisure, incentive, and talent for the composition of this novel. If we agree with the general opinion that the Journey is the work of an individual author who adapted his sources in the Shakespearean fashion of exuberant invention, then the hundred-chapter novel as we now have it poses few perplexing problems as to its text and derivation.

The novel has its historical basis in the epic pilgrimage of Xuanzang to India. Also known by his honorific title Tripitaka or Tang San-zang, this saintly monk of great intellectual ability is a major figure in Chinese Buddhism. He traveled abroad for seventeen years (629–645) and brought back from India 657 Buddhist texts. Upon his return, he devoted the remainder of his life to translating these scriptures and establishing the abstruse Mere Ideation school of Chinese Buddhism. His school was never that popular, but even during his lifetime his travels became a matter of public interest.

As his legend grew with his fame, Xuanzang became, like the Liangshan heroes, a popular subject for storytellers. There is extant a brief promptbook of seventeen chapters (the first chapter is missing) dating from the Southern Song period entitled Da-Tang San-zang qü-jing shi-hua (“The tale, interspersed with verses, of the quest of scriptures by Tripitaka of the great Tang dynasty”). In it we can already see that Monkey has emerged as Xuanzang’s chief guardian on the road and that the adventures they encounter are fantastic in character, involving gods, demons, and bizarre kingdoms.

The evolution of the Tripitaka legend properly culminates in Wu Chengen’s massive creation. What must be apparent to every reader of the Journey is that the Tripitaka of the novel, who often appears as a deliberate caricature of a saintly monk, could not have borne any resemblance to his historical counterpart. Though Xuanzang’s initial difficulties in the desert had provided clues for the storytellers, few details of his subsequent journey could have interested them. Soon after crossing the desert, the historical Xuanzang meets with the king of Turfan, who sends him off with a splendid retinue, letters of recommendation to rulers of other countries, and an abundant supply of gold, silver, and silk. It is true that the handsomely equipped traveler once meets with robbers and is on another occasion about to be sacrificed by pirates when a miraculous storm saves him, but during the years spent at the various courts in India in the company of kings, holy men, and leading scholars, Xuanzang appears primarily as a man of piety, courage, and tact, and one, moreover, endowed with great intellectual curiosity and deeply versed in scholastic Indian logic. We find no trace of this revered foreign intellectual in the popular literary representations of Tripitaka.

The Tripitaka of the novel is based on at least three different persons. First of all, he is the saintly monk of popular legend, a mythical hero suggestive of Moses and Oedipus. Son of a zhuang-yuan (one who has earned the highest honors at the palace examination) and a prime minister’s daughter, soon after his birth he is abandoned by his mother out of fear that someone is going to kill him. He drifts on a river until he is picked up by a Buddhist abbot, who rears him. At eighteen, he is ordained as a priest and goes in search of his lost parents. After he has found them both, his filial piety and evident holiness attract so much attention at court that he is soon entrusted by Emperor Taizong with a mission to India to procure Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures. Modeled upon many earlier legends of Buddhist saints, the youthful Tripitaka is strictly a product of the popular imagination.

This second aspect of Tripitaka as a potential Buddha is central to the plot of the novel. After all, the monsters and demons are not interested in a monk from China, however saintly he may be, but in a magic host whose flesh can confer upon them everlasting life. But insofar as Tripitaka is aware of himself as an object of supreme temptation, he becomes in the novel a person forever apprehensive of his danger. His initial image as a pious monk endowed with wisdom and determination notwithstanding, Wu Cheng-en therefore presents Tripitaka primarily in his third aspect, as an ordinary mortal undertaking a hazardous journey and easily upset by the smallest inconvenience. Peevish and humorless, he is a bad leader partial to the most indolent of his group and shows little true faith in his role as a strict Pharisee, ostentatiously attempting to keep to his vegetarian diet and avoid compromising female company. Certainly he suggests nothing of the courage of his historic namesake nor of the fortitude of Christian saints willing to undergo temptation in order to reach the higher stages of sanctification. He neither withstands nor yields to the cannibalistic and sexual assaults of the demons and monsters; he is merely helpless. Whereas in such Western allegories as Everyman and The Pilgrim’s Progress the hero goes through a carefully charted journey to enable him to accept death or enter heaven at the end, Tripitaka shows no sign of spiritual improvement during his adventures. If anything, he gets even more peevish and ill-tempered as his journey progresses. Even while he is being ferried to the Further Shore of Salvation to face Buddha himself and receive the scriptures, he is angry at Monkey, who has pushed him into the bottomless boat and gotten him soaked. “Sitting miserably here, he wrung out his clothes, shook out his shoes, and grumbled at Monkey for having got him into this scrape.”¹

As a comic figure in his own right, Tripitaka is indeed Everyman, as critics have often remarked, but the religious implications of that designation can be understood only by reference to the kind of idealistic Buddhist philosophy that the novel exemplifies. If Tripitaka shows no spiritual progress on his journey, it is because in the light of that philosophy he is the embodiment of fearful self-consciousness forever enslaved by phenomena and therefore forever incapable of reaching that peace of mind which alone can rout the terror of the senses. Early on his journey, after he has taken Monkey and Pigsy as disciples but before his meeting with Sandy, he is instructed to seek out the Zen master Crow Nest (Wu-chao) and to receive from him the Heart Sūtra, which is duly recorded in the novel in the historical Xuanzang’s own standard translation. Tripitaka appears so transported by the truth of that sūtra that he immediately composes a poem to indicate his new state of spiritual illumination. What has so far escaped the notice of modern critics is that, like his monster-disciples, the sūtra is itself a spiritual companion appointed for Tripitaka’s protection on his perilous journey. And in the scheme of the Buddhist allegory, it is a far more important guide than any of his disciples, since a Tripitaka in true possession of its teaching would have no need for their service and would realize the illusory character of his calamities.

Because of its brevity, the Heart Sūtra is the central wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) text of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Historically, it was a text dear to Xuanzang, “for when he was crossing the desert in 629,” Waley informs us, “the recitation of it had routed the desert-goblins that attacked him far more effectively than appeals to the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara [Guan-yin].” In the primitive Song version of the story, accordingly, we find that the receiving of this sūtra constitutes the crowning success of Tripitaka’s quest. He has already been to the kingdom of Tian-zhu (the traditional Chinese name for India), where he received 5,048 scrolls of Buddhist scriptures; though none of these are identified by name, it is pointedly mentioned that the Heart Sūtra is still missing. Now on his return journey, he stops by the Fragrant Grove Market (or Fragrant Grove Temple) of the Pan-lu Kingdom, and a god informs him in a dream that he is going to receive the Heart Sūtra the next day. And, the next day, a Buddha who looks like a fifteen-year-old monk descends upon a cloud and hands him the sūtra, saying, “I transmit to you this Heart Sūtra. When you return to court, you must protect it and cherish it. Its power reaches to heaven and hell. It is compact with the mysterious forces of yin and yang, and therefore do not lightly transmit it to anybody. It will be extremely difficult for the less fortunate multitudes to receive it.”

By the time the storytellers’ version was recorded in the Yuan period, we may presume that, in view of its climactic importance in the primitive version, the episode of the transmission of the Heart Sūtra must have been transposed to a much earlier section of the narrative, so that the meaning of that sūtra could be further expounded by the pilgrims on their journey. And we may further maintain that, in adapting this source, Wu Cheng-en has done nothing less than make his whole novel a philosophical commentary on the sūtra. George Steiner has brilliantly observed that the major characters in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, when confronted with personal problems of crucial moral importance, often recite and discuss passages from the New Testament, which in turn keynote and illuminate the meaning of the novels in which these characters appear. In Journey, the Heart Sūtra is a subject of repeated discussion between Tripitaka and Monkey and serves the same novelistic function.

Though Tripitaka seems to have gained immediate illumination upon receiving the sūtra and recites it constantly afterward, its transcendent teaching that “form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form” is so beyond his mortal understanding that every calamity that befalls him demonstrates anew his actual incomprehension. During pauses between adventures, therefore, it is Monkey, with his far superior spiritual understanding, that repeatedly asks his master to heed the sūtra. Thus, in chapter 43, he makes another attempt:

Reverend master, you have forgotten the verse, “No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.” Of all of us who have forsaken the world, our eyes should not see color, our ears should not hear sound, our nose should not smell, our tongue should not taste, our body should not feel cold and heat, and our mind should not harbor vain illusions: this is known as “routing the six thieves.” Now your mind is constantly occupied with the task of seeking the scriptures, you are afraid of the monsters and unwilling to give up your body, you beg for food and move your tongue, you are fond of sweet smells and titillate your nose, you listen to sounds and excite your ear, you see things around you and strain your pupils. Since you have welcomed these six thieves on your own invitation, how can you hope to see Buddha in the Western Paradise?”

Tripitaka is often aware of Monkey’s superior understanding. In chapter 93, when Pigsy and Sandy laugh at Monkey’s pretensions as a Zen master because he has again reminded their master to heed the Heart Sūtra, Tripitaka upbraids the two less discerning disciples, “Sandy and Pigsy, don’t talk so foolishly. What Monkey comprehends is the wordless language. This is true comprehension.” Measured against the standard of nonattachment upheld by Monkey, therefore, Tripitaka’s every manifestation of fear and credulity, of fanatical obsession with correct conduct and peevish concern over his creaturely comforts is as much part of a deliberate comedy as the obviously gross behavior of Pigsy.

But Tripitaka is not only enslaved by his senses. His humanitarian pity—the most endearing trait about him—is itself a form of enslavement. Upon joining Tripitaka, Monkey’s first act is to slay the six thieves—Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, Mind, Body—an allegorical event indicative of his superior detachment in comparison with the other pilgrims. But Tripitaka is horrified because, among his other frailties, he is still obsessed with love and compassion for phenomenal beings. This episode causes the first temporary rift between master and disciple, and Monkey is later twice punished with dismissal, following his seemingly merciless killing of first a demon in a pathetic human disguise and then a number of brigands. From the viewpoint of popular Buddhism, Tripitaka has on all occasions followed the command not to kill, but because the novel inculcates the kind of Buddhist wisdom that excludes even the finest human sentiments as a guide to salvation, he is seen as a victim of perpetual delusion and can never make the same kind of spiritual progress as the hero of a Christian allegory. The novel, however, ultimately demonstrates the paradoxical character of this wisdom in that its nominal hero is granted Buddhahood at the end precisely because he has done nothing to earn it. To consciously strive for Buddhahood would again have placed him under bondage.

Monkey (Sun Wu-kong, or Sun Aware of Vacuity), who repeatedly warns Tripitaka of his spiritual blindness, is, of course, the real hero of the book. He has already assumed the role of Tripitaka’s protector on the road in the Song shih-hua, and many of his deeds familiar to the reader of the hundredchapter novel must have appeared in the Yuan version, in however sketchy a fashion. But it is Wu Cheng-en who has enlarged upon these deeds and consistently defined his hero’s character in terms of his spiritual detachment, his prankish humor, his restless energy, and his passionate devotion to his master.

Especially during the Tang, merchants from Central Asia carried on an active trade in China, and they brought with them stories of their own regions, which stimulated the Chinese literati to compose tales of a romantic and supernatural cast known as quan-ji. The Rāmāyana may or may not have contributed to the character Sun Wu-kong, but there is no doubt that his many tricks and feats along with other supernatural motives in the novel are ultimately traceable to the influence of Indian as well as Persian and Arab literature. Monkey, for example, is an adept at magical transformations. In his celebrated battle with the celestial general Erh-lang Shen in chapter 6, the two combatants pursue each other through a series of disguises. I quote a small excerpt:

Monkey, trembling in every limb, hastily turned his cudgel into an embroidery needle, and hiding it about his person, changed himself into a fish, and slipped into the stream. Rushing down to the bank, Erh-lang could see nothing of him. “This simian,” he said, “has certainly changed himself into a fish and hidden under the water. I must change myself too if I am to catch him. So he changed himself into a cormorant and skimmed hither and thither over the stream. Monkey, looking up out of the water, suddenly saw a bird hovering above. It was like a blue kite, but its plumage was not blue. It was like a heron, but had no tuft on its head. It was like a crane, but its feet were not red. “I’ll be bound that’s Erh-lang looking for me …” He released a few bubbles and swam swiftly away. “That fish letting bubbles,” said Erh-lang to himself, “is like a carp, but its tail is not red; it is like a tench, but there are no patterns on its scales. It is like a black-fish, but there are no stars on its head; it is like a bream, but there are no bristles on its gills. Why did it make off like that when it saw me? I’ll be bound it’s Monkey, who has changed himself into a fish.” And swooping down, he opened his beak and snapped at him. Monkey whisked out of the water, and changed himself into a freckled bustard, standing all alone on the bank.²

Though we find even in pre-Tang literature legendary or fictitious characters who are able to transform themselves into bestial shapes, the possessors of such powers could not assume any shape at will and certainly could not put on a performance of magical virtuosity like that of Monkey and Erh-lang. Their resemblance in this respect to the combatants from The Arabian Nights does not mean that the makers of the Monkey legend were specifically indebted to that book, but it certainly indicates their general awareness of the popular literature of the Middle and Near East.

In chapter 1, as the leader of the monkeys on the Flower and Fruit Mountain, he enjoys an idyllic existence of pure bliss. Provided with an infinite supply of food and unmolested by hunters or predators, the monkey colony behind the Water Curtain Cave is far more carefree than the Peach Fountain colony celebrated by T’ao Ch’ien. Yet Monkey is not content:

“Your Majesty is very hard to please,” said the monkeys, laughing. “Every day we have happy meetings on fairy mountains, in blessed spots, in ancient caves, on holy islands. We are not subject to the Unicorn or Phoenix, nor to the restraints of any human king. Such freedom is an immeasurable blessing. What can it be that causes you this sad misgiving?” “It is true,” said the Monkey King, “that to-day I am not answerable to the law of any human king, nor need I fear the menace of any beast or bird. But the time will come when I shall grow old and weak. Yama, King of Death, is secretly waiting to destroy me. Is there no way by which, instead of being born again on earth, I might live forever among the people of the sky?”³

His ambition, then, is to seek immortality, to perpetuate his enjoyment of life beyond the control of Yama. He presently undertakes a long voyage across the oceans to seek a master able to teach him how to conquer death. Allegorically, it is a quest for spiritual understanding, but in the larger mythical framework of the novel it is also a quest for magical power. Even for the most exalted celestials, their badges of power are invariably instruments of life-sustaining and death-causing magic. Laozi (Tai-shang Lao-jün), the supreme deity in the Daoist pantheon, cherishes as his chief possession the Crucible of the Eight Trigrams, by means of which he manufactures longevity pills and melts down intransigent enemies. And Subodhi, the Zen patriarch whom Monkey has chosen to serve, also respects his desire to prolong life and learn magical arts. Monkey is eventually dismissed because he has become vain of his attainments before the other disciples, but the inherent desirability of these arts is not held in question.

Monkey was hatched from a stone egg, under the influence of the sun and moon. Like many other Chinese novels, Journey begins at the beginning, with the creation myth. In this regard, Monkey’s discontent with a pastoral mode of life and his ambition to seek power and knowledge can be seen as signs of a conscious striving upward—from inanimate stone to animal shape with human intelligence to the highest spiritual attainment possible. Until this striving is deflected into the Buddhist path of obedient service, following his humiliating defeat in the palm of Buddha, Monkey is but the smartest of all the monsters, who share with him this unquenchable desire for evolution.

Even in his rebellious phase, he differs from the other monsters and from Ravana and the Satan of Paradise Lost in his ability to view himself in a humorous light and remain detached from whatever business he is engaged in. He is never too solemn, even when fighting an entire battalion of heavenly troops. Without his sense of humor, Monkey would become a tragic hero or share the fate of the other monsters. With it, however, he can turn from rebel to Buddha’s obedient servant without forfeiting our sympathy. This sense of humor, however coarsely and at times cruelly expressed at the expense of his companions and enemies, implies his ultimate transcendence of all human desires, to which Pigsy remains prey and from which Tripitaka barely detaches himself through his vigilant self-control. But to the end he retains the comic image of a mischievous monkey whose very zeal and mockery become an expression of gay detachment.

If Monkey is always the spirit of mischief when he is in command of a situation, there are occasions, nevertheless, when he impresses us with his passionate sorrow and anger. If humanitarian pity remains an endearing trait of Tripitaka, then, with all his superior understanding and mocking detachment, Monkey is also the antithesis of Buddhist emptiness in his passionate attachment to the cause of the journey and to his master.

Moreover, Tripitaka is so selfish that once, after Monkey has dispatched two brigands, Tripitaka prays for their peace and explicitly dissociates himself from the supposed crime:

In chapter 27, after Monkey has finally killed a demon who has thrice assumed human shape to deceive the pilgrims, the enraged Tripitaka gives him a note of dismissal, saying, “Monkey-head, take this as proof that I no longer want you as my disciple. If I ever see you again, may I be instantly condemned to the Avici Hell!” Monkey, who has killed the demon to protect his master, takes this extremely hard.

It is this passionate devotion to his home, to Tripitaka and his cause, that sets Monkey apart from the rest of the pilgrims. Above and beyond his mythic and comic roles, he shows himself as an endearing person subject to misunderstanding and jealousy and given to frequent outbursts of genuine emotion. He, too, belies his superior attainment in Buddhist wisdom with his incorrigible humanity.

In the preceding section, I have sketched Tripitaka and Monkey against their historical-literary backgrounds and, in doing so, have indicated the intricate connections between the diverse modes of myth, allegory, and comedy to be observed in the novel. In view of this complexity of structure, it is understandable that critics have tended to emphasize one mode at the expense of the others. Traditional commentators, more attuned to the mystical teaching of the book, have one and all stressed its allegory. Starting with Hu Shi, modern critics have repudiated the allegorical interpretation and stressed its wealth of comedy and satire. “Freed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations by Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucianist commentators,” declares Hu Shi in his foreword to Waley’s translation, “Monkey is simply a book of good humor, profound nonsense, good-natured satire and delightful entertainment.” (The phrase “profound nonsense,” however, concedes the necessity for philosophical or allegorical interpretation.) Communist critics have further elaborated on the political aspects of the comedy, paying special attention to the revolutionary implications of its satire on traditional bureaucracy. They have cited instances in Ming history of gross official injustice and of the pampered arrogance of Daoist priests at court, a class repeatedly ridiculed in the novel, as sources of Wu Cheng-en’s satiric inspiration.

The Communist approach, however, presupposes a political novelist deliberately scoring the evils of his time. But, under the autocratic rule of the Ming, it is very unlikely that Wu would have dared to make political remarks or concoct political fables in the Swiftian manner even if he had felt the urge to do so. A repeated failure at the examinations (he finally earned a senior licentiateship in 1544 and many years later served briefly in a minor official capacity), he could have become an embittered satirist of political intent, but, judging by his novel as well as his poetry and prose, he was rather a man of genial humor and not at all obsessed with his lack of worldly success or with the degeneracy of the Ming court at his time. He records in his novel, to be sure, many shrewd observations on Chinese bureaucracy, but they strike us as the quintessence of folk wisdom rather than as pointed satire of contemporary events. As a matter of fact, he regularly quotes proverbs for comic effect and makes fun of all traditional butts of satire. If Daoist priests are derided in some of the most hilarious episodes, Buddhists fared little better, since Tripitaka himself is seen as the constant source of ridicule. Yet in his didactic moments the novelist is not above adopting the traditional gesture of showing equal reverence for the three teachings: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.

In extolling the novel as satire, however, modern critics have paid inadequate attention to its mythical strength. They have, of course, praised its author’s mythological imagination, but they see it at work mainly in his elaboration of the many fantastic episodes presumably already present in the Yuan version. Yet, as a critical concept in the study of literature, “myth” actually refers to the representation of any reality suggestive of the archetypal situations of primordial humanity. Ulysses is structured on myth though it deals with the Dublin of the early twentieth century. In like fashion, the mythical significance of Journey lies not so much in its use of Indic, Buddhist, and Daoist mythologies as in its rendition of archetypal characters and events. With Journey, even a reader of Waley’s abridgment will be struck by the resemblance of its major episodes to classic embodiments of mythical reality in Western and Indic literature. The story of the Crow-Cock Kingdom, for instance, has the makings of a Hamlet myth: a foully murdered king, a crafty confidant who usurps his throne and his conjugal bed, and an estranged prince enjoined with the task of revenge. In the story of the Cart-Slow Kingdom, the Buddhist inhabitants suffer the same fate as the Israelites in their Egyptian captivity, and Monkey and Pigsy vanquish the king’s three Daoist counselors in the same magical fashion as Moses and Aaron triumphed over Pharaoh’s priests. As for the monster that rules over the River That Leads to Heaven, his demand for an annual sacrifice of live children makes him kin to such familiar figures of Western and Chinese mythology as the Minotaur and Ho-po.

But in the last three episodes instanced and numerous other episodes of this type left out of Waley’s version, their possibly coincidental resemblance to earlier myths is a less impressive proof of their mythical status than their striking suggestion of the fertility cults of primitive man. Thus the monster at the River That Leads to Heaven has to be propitiated because failure to observe the annual sacrifice will bring agricultural ruin to the area under his control. Similarly, the three Daoists enjoy the complete trust of their king because, as rain makers of proved competence, they guarantee the fertility of his country. And, upon entering the Crow-Cock Kingdom, the future usurper breaks a long siege of drought and thereby earns the gratitude and love of the king. In this respect, the wizard is even more suggestive of Oedipus than of Claudius, in that his clearly manifested mana entitles him to the slaying of the powerless king and the possession of his wife. Yet, on the other hand, the story of the Crow-Cock Kingdom only goes through the motions of primitive ritual and tragic murder. Though the king is pushed into the well, he reposes down there quite unharmed and is eventually revived. The usurper is a castrated lion, so that, with all the lewdness implicit in his violation of the queen and the harem, the ladies actually complain of his neglect. And, quite unlike Hamlet, the prince is filial to his mother rather than obsessed with her supposed perfidy; with the aid of the pilgrims, he restores the old order without bloodshed. And after his spree on earth, the lion is reclaimed by his owner, the bodhisattva Manjusri. With this episode as with numerous other episodes, myth is ultimately placed in a larger comic framework: a primordial reality is represented so that its unreality may be the more effectively exposed.

With his sense of the ridiculous anchored in the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, therefore, the author mocks all the monsters just as he mocks all the pilgrims and celestials in the book. Not only is everything infinitely amusing to his observant eye, but in the ultimate religious sense everything that exists is but maya with which we are infatuated. Even Monkey, the most serious character and the one nearest to approaching an understanding of emptiness, is not spared this affectionate ridicule. To readers conditioned to accept the reality of literary fiction, this attempt at constant negation can be at times very unsettling. Writing from the Christian viewpoint, which accords reality to every soul be it suffering eternal damnation in hell or rejoicing in eternal bliss in paradise, Dante created a massive comedy of substantial reality designed to elicit our strongest emotional responses. Wu Cheng-en, on the other hand, provides in episode after comic episode the illusion of mythical reality, but he then inevitably exposes the falsehood of that reality in furtherance of his Buddhist comedy. Every time he kills off a fascinating monster or arbitrarily returns him to heaven, we are justified in feeling that he is mocking our emotional attachment to that monster. Like Tripitaka himself, we are too much creatures of the senses and of humanitarian sympathy to be able to adjust adequately to the Buddhist reality of emptiness.

Wu Cheng-en’s supreme comic creation is Pigsy, who symbolizes the gross sensual life in the absence of religious striving and mythical ambition. He is doubly comic, because as a reluctant pilgrim he has no calling whatever for the monastic life and because for all his monstrous size and strength he entertains no ambition beyond a huge meal and a good sleep with a woman in his arms. He is the average sensual man writ large. He deteriorates on the road, turning into an envious, mendacious, and cowardly glutton obsessed with the life of sensual ease, precisely because his journey lacks incentives for worldly success and domestic contentment. The son-in-law in the Kao family, he is a selfish and hard-working individualist, no different from any conscientious family man who works all day and comes home in the evening to attend to his family and beautify his home. Though lecherous, he is perfectly happy if he has the nightly consolation of sleeping with his wife. By ordinary standards, therefore, he is something of a model husband. His father-in-law may object to his hideous features, but he cannot complain that he does not work extremely hard on the farm. Even his huge appetite is a direct consequence of his hard labor.

In other scenes, the author brings out the sinister aspect of Pigsy’s selfishness and the unbelievable childishness of the easily despondent Tripitaka. Both are self-centered: Pigsy cares only for his own welfare, and Tripitaka thinks only of his personal danger. Both therefore are often seen in league against Monkey. If, with his superior understanding, Monkey exposes Tripitaka’s obsession with fear, with his zest for a life of disinterested action he puts to shame Pigsy’s sensuality, sloth, and envy. The allegorical meaning of these contrasts is quite obvious, but on a more literal level, in their frequent altercations these three are simply travelers on an arduous journey who sooner or later must get on each other’s nerves. In this realistic perspective, Tripitaka’s role is that of the unobservant, easily flattered father, while Monkey and Pigsy are rival brothers, in the fashion of Tom Jones and Blifil.

With all its wild conceits about food, Journey bears some important resemblance to Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais and Wu Cheng-en, moreover, were almost exact contemporaries, and both bequeathed to their respective national cultures two comic masterpieces unsurpassed for their sheer animal exuberance. In their grosser passages, both works can shock the more fastidious modern taste in their disregard of humanitarian feelings. Just as Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Friar John show the greatest contempt for their enemies and slaughter them for a joke, so does Monkey. And Pigsy, when he shakes off his usual indolence to share his fellow pilgrim’s prankish sense of humor, displays the liveliest spirit in teasing and punishing their defenseless enemies.

But, despite their comparable senses of humor, the two authors differ in their attitudes toward appetite. For all his comic exuberance, Wu Cheng-en is not a Renaissance humanist; in point of moral sensibility, he is far more Chaucerian than Rabelaisian, in that he finds man’s insatiable appetite ultimately laughable and as a negative confirmation of his absurdity. Pigsy, his major symbol of appetite, has no spiritual and intellectual pretensions whatever. In addition, the author can good-humoredly indulge his character’s appetite for food since, in Chinese eyes, gluttony calls for far less moral disapprobation than lechery and is typically a matter for comic attention.

In Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser, one of the few fruitful ventures into comparative studies of Chinese and Western literature and manners, H. C. Chang has admirably stated that whereas Western allegory as represented by The Faerie Queene personifies abstract mental and moral states, Chinese allegory, which is expressive of a more practical ethical impulse, primarily illustrates the fact of temptation. The temptation of Pigsy is therefore far more suggestive of a latter-day Western allegory like Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” in its impulse toward concrete fictional realization. Given the simpler conventions of Chinese storytelling, it is as gripping a study of lust as the latter is a study of greed. It is certainly far more psychologically subtle than anything in The Water Margin or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The characterization of Pigsy in this self-contained allegory, one may further note, is of a piece with his characterization in the rest of the novel. The Pigsy that wants to marry and stay on the widow’s estate is the same person who reluctantly bids farewell to the Gao family. As always, he is an object of ridicule to the others, but he himself is serious throughout. He is very much on his best behavior in his negotiations with the widow, even though time and again his impatience betrays his desperation. He is apologetic about his appearance but brags about his usefulness on the farm. His sexual hunger is given astonishing reality when, faced with the daughters’ refusal, he begs the widow to marry him. But this sexual hunger is inseparable from his hunger for purposive activity. Like any other spiritually ungifted average sensual person, Pigsy sees challenge in the ownership and management of a large estate but no challenge at all in a wearisome pilgrimage. In The Faerie Queene, the voluptuous nymphs in the Bower of Bliss appear primarily in the aspect of naked sensuality, and the men who succumb to their lures immediately lose their self-respect and turn bestial in their obliviousness to all duties and responsibilities. With Pigsy, the sight of beautiful women in possession of a fabulous estate only fully arouses his domestic instinct. (In his subsequent temptation by the spider spirits, who are mere sirens without property, Pigsy behaves far more impudently, because he is not serious about them.) If he is starved of sex on his journey, he is at the same time stultified by his lack of opportunity to prove his usefulness as a householder. In Pigsy, with all his unflattering physical and moral features, Wu Cheng-en has drawn the portrait of every common man who finds fulfillment in his pursuit of respectable, mundane goals.