The Monkey King

I just finished reading Monkey, I am glad I did. This is Arthur Whaley's abridged, 300-page translation of a Chinese classic titled Journey to the West, generally known in English as The Monkey King. It appeared in 1592. The manuscript of this 1,000-page epic was not signed, but most authorities think it was written by a gentleman named Wu Cheng'en. That doesn't settle the question of authorship, though, because people have been debating for 430 years how much of the story Wu (or someone else) took from older texts and oral folktales and how much he made up.

The Monkey King is a very weird story.

It has three parts that are quite different from each other. In the first, the Monkey King wakens from stone and gathers all the monkeys around him in a kingdom where they eat fruit and have fun all day. Then they have some trouble with their neighbors and end up forming a military state, and their king becomes an invincible warrior.

But Monkey is restless and ambitious and after a few centuries of ruling the monkeys he decides he wants to become immortal. So he enters into study with a great Taoist sage. What he studies and how is left very vague, but anway he somehow acquires an array of magic powers known as the 72 Transformations and gets himself invited up to heaven. The story's heaven is a bizarre mishmash of Chinese traditions, ruled by the Jade Emperor (a Confucian figure) with a whole court of generals, bureaucrats, scholars, and hangers on; Lao Tzu and his Daoist friends are there, mixing elixirs of immortality. Monkey goes on a sort of rampage, eating all the peaches in the garden of immortality, ruining the Emperor's annual feast, and so on. The Emperor sends his 40,000 immortal soldiers against Monkey, but they cannot defeat him. So the Emperor has to call in Buddha, who challenges Monkey to race across a vast plain toward four distant mountains. Monkey does so and thinks he has proved his prowess, until Buddha reveals that he has been running for weeks across the Buddha's palm. His power demonstrated, Buddha seals Monkey under a stone mountain for 500 years.

After 500 years Buddha finally releases Monkey to undertake a mission, accompanying a monk Whaley calls Tripitaka on a journey to India to acquire Buddhist scriptures. Together with two other demonic persons and a dragon transformed into a horse (see image at top), Monkey escorts Tripitaka to his destination and back, rescuing the unworldly monk from one disaster after another. In the original they have 81 separate misadventures, 81 being a sacred Buddhist number, and end up as immortal Buddhist sages.

This "journey to the west" is based on a true story. During the Sui (581-618) and Tang (618-907) Dynasties, China went big for Buddhism, which became a deep part of the culture and the main focus of religion in the court. But their knowledge of Buddhism was, many felt, limited by the poor quality and limited number of Buddhist texts they had available. So a monk named Xuanzang (602–664) undertook a journey to India to obtain better texts. He left in 629, defying the emperor, who had, in a classic Chinese move, banned all travel to other nations on the grounds that foreign influences were corrupting Chinese culture.

Xuanzang was gone from 629 to 645, and he returned with what sounds like a wagon-load of texts. These comprised what were called in Sanskrit the Tripitaka, that is, the Threefold Way. Xuanzang was lionized by the Tang court and quite a few statues of him were set up, some of which survive. An account of his journey was written by court scholars, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. This is one of those fascinating medieval travelogues that mixes up what seem to be authentic descriptions of foreign lands with outlandish bits, like a race between dragons. The monks of one temple tell Xuanzang that Buddha preached in their land while flying in the air, because his footsteps caused earthquakes.

This event made such an impression in China that it acquired the vast array of folk embellishment that Wu Cheng'en recorded. Along the way Xuanzang lost his name and took on that of the scriptures he acquired, Tang Sanzang, which is just the Chinese transliteration of Tripitaka. 

The story is hugely popular across East Asia, and there are many versions in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The most recent is Dragonball, a Japane manga and then anime that has spawned more than 300 televised episodes and half a dozen movies. In this version a human boy named Goku, with a monkey tail, lives out the story from Journey to the West, helping a sage search for the Dragonball. I watched bits of this over my sons' shoulders and knew vaguely that it was based on the Monkey King, but I just discovered that Goku-son is how the Chinese characters for Monkey King would be pronounced in Japanese.

I don't recommend Monkey as a story for your reading pleasure; it is too weird, absurd, and repetitive for modern readers. But I found it to be a fascinating glimpse into Asian folklore and in particular to beliefs about magic, immortality, and heaven. It will be good fodder for my own stories and games.