The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 3

by Unknown

  5. Women State (or nation): Nüzi guo , this imaginary domain of a land inhabited only by women, long known in Central Asia, has also appeared in Chinese mythology, historiography, travel literature, and fiction. First, there was a reference to the Western Heaven Women State (Xitian nüguo ) in Xuanzang’s official biography. See FSZ, j 4 in SZZSHB, p. 87. In Xuanzang’s own writing, the Da Tong Xiyuji (j 4), there is the reference to an Eastern Women State (Dongnüguo ), which the historical priest distinguishes from the Great Western Women State (Xida nüguo ), recorded in j 11. See Xinyi Da Tong Xiyuji (Taipei, 1998), pp. 207 and 539–41. For other sources, see the Classic of Mountains and Seas, j 7 (“Haiwai xijing ”), 3a (SBBY); Liang Shu , j 54, in Ershiwushi 2:1839e–d; Nan Shi , j 79, in Ershiwushi 3: 2732d. The fictive account is found in episode 10 of the Poetic Tale; see XYJZLHB, pp. 48–50. For critical discussion of sources, see Antecedents, pp. 13–14.

  6. Marshal Wen: one of the four grand marshals of Heaven. See, for example, chapter 51.

  7. Aiming down there: that is, at the genitals.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  1. Human seeds: renzhong , a phrase that may be rendered as “human seeds,” as I have done here, or “a man’s seed.” The origin of the phrase is possibly to be found in the story of Ruan Xian (styled Zhongrong ), nephew of the famous Jin poet and drinker, Ruan Ji (210–63), in the chapter on “The Free and Unrestrained (Rendan )” in Richard B. Mather, trans., A New Account of Tales of the World (Ann Arbor, 1976). Xian once fancied (xing ) a foreign slave girl belonging to his paternal aunt. When the latter moved away after reneging on an earlier promise to leave the slave with him, Xian chased them down and returned with both man and woman riding on a borrowed donkey. His explanation: “A man’s seed is not to be lost .” This translation by Richard Mather (see New Account, p. 376, #15) reads the previous word xing correctly as meaning having sex with the girl (see Shishuo xinyu , j 3a, 30a, SBBY). The story may imply that the slave girl is pregnant with his seed already. In the story of the novel’s present episode, however, the male pilgrims are not pregnant (and the two who were previously had their pregnancies aborted). They were so addressed by the women of this state because they could provide the “seeds.” Thus, my choice.

  2. Red leaves: a reference to a story of the Tang emperor Xizong’s time (874–89) in which a palace woman, Lady Han , wrote a poem on a red leaf that floated out of the palace in the current of the moat. Picked up by a scholar named Yu You , another poem he wrote on a red leaf was sent back to the palace when it was dropped in the moat’s upper reach. The two of them eventually married years later when the emperor released thousands of palace concubines, for the red leaves they kept in secret were discovered in each other’s belongings and acknowledged as pledges. On that occasion Han wrote another poem with the lines: “Today we’ve become two happy mates, / Knowing now the red leaf’s our fine go-between , .” See Zhang Shi , “Liuhongji ,” in Liu Fu , Qingsuo gaoyi (Shanghai, 1958), pp. 46–49. Some accounts have Han married to another man by the name of Li Yin . See the “Hongye tishi ,” in Langye daizui pian , j 21, 14a–15b, ed. and annotated by Nagasawa Kikuya , vol. 7 of the Wahokubon Kanseki zuihitsushū (Tokyo, 1973).

  3. Red threads: the Old Man in the Moon, the marriage broker par excellence in Chinese mythology, is supposed to tie the feet of fated lovers with scarlet threads to indicate a lasting relationship.

  4. The man set apart from others or “this lonely man (gujia )” is another form of euphemistic self-address for the emperor.

  5. Estrade Numina or lingtai , the name for an astronomical observatory established supposedly in the ancient Zhou period. According to Schafer, p. 13, “another observatory with this name, as always closely affiliated with the divinity of the Son of Heaven [i.e., king; later, emperor], was erected in Han times. Then and later its function was to provide the divine king with an accurate statement of changes in the upper air and what they portended. Its formal charge was ‘to calculate the verified evidence of stellar measures, the auspicious responses of the Six Pneumas [liu qi], the permutations and transformations of the divine illuminates,’ all with the purpose of foreseeing the sources of good and evil fortune, and ultimately of promoting the welfare of the country.”

  6. Zhaojun and Xi Shi were legendary beauties of antiquity. The first, whose name was Wang Jiang (alternately, or ), was a legendary beauty of Han times, who, according to a familiar story, was sent off to marry a Xiongnu chieftan because she refused to bribe the palace portrait painter, charged with showing the emperor different pictures of palace maids. The emperor selected what he thought was the ugliest one, only to discover just before her departure how attractive Wang was. Xi Shi was an even more ancient figure of the Spring and Autumn period, who was offered to the King of Wu by the defeated King of Yue. When the state of Wu subsequently declined because of that ruler’s infatuation with the girl, he was in turn defeated by the King of Yue.

  7. East Hall: dongge . I follow here the translation of Charles O. Hucker, “Governmental Organization of the Ming Dynasty,” HJAS 21 (1958): 29. In Han times, the East Hall was erected by the prime minister Gongsun Hong as a hostel for worthy counselors. See the Han Shu , j 58, in Ershiwushi 1: 0504c. By the Ming, however, it had become one of the six Grand Secretariats (i.e., neige ) nominally subordinate to the Hanlin Academy.

  8. The Yellow Road, huangdao , is the ecliptic. The term is a traditional metaphor for a lucky or auspicious day.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  1. The fiend is punning on the sounds of water pudding and high tide, both using the phonemes of shuigao but different graphs ( vs ). The Tang Monk’s subsequent reply also makes use of a pun between bean-paste stuffing (Deng = dousha xian = ) and sand traps ( shaxian).

  2. Liu Cuicui: , name of a famous courtesan in Hangzhou at the time of the Southern Song. See the Xihu youlan zhi , j 13.

  3. Star Lord Orionis: this is mao , one of the twenty-eight constellations or lodges (xiu). Many scholars give Pleiades as the corresponding constellation, but I follow Schafer (pp. 76–77), who gives the constellation λ, φ1, φ2.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  1. That mind: the original metaphor here is the Spirit Terrace or Estrada Numina, ling-tai .

  2. Three Wains: Triyāna, sansheng , the three vehicles or means of conveyance that ferry living beings across saṁsāra, the endless cycles of birth and death that only Buddhist enlightenment can overcome and assist the beings in reaching the shores of nirvāṇa. The three means of conveyance are variously classified, the simplest one of which is differentiated as small, medium, and great. This structure of size may be further correlated with the understanding of enlightenment: those who hear and obey and those who through training attain self-enlightenment are considered as both belonging to the Small Vehicle or Hinayāna, for their concern is essentially personal. The Great Vehicle or Mahāyāna is so named because it is the way of the Bodhisattva, the aim of which is the salvific enlightenment of all sentient beings through one’s compassionate self-giving. This understanding underlines the drama played out in Guanyin’s epiphany leading to Xuanzang’s “conversion” to this division of Buddhism and his selection as the scripture pilgrim in JW 1, chapter 12.

  3. The poem is a lyric written to the tune of “The Partridge Sky.”

  4. Rice-cakes: literally, the jiaoshu or zongzi , the pyramid-shaped cake or pudding made of glutinous rice and wrapped in bamboo or lotus leaf. It is a ritual food for the date of duanwu , or the Double-Fifth Festival (the fifth day of the fifth lunar month). This is the traditional date for commemorating the suicide of Qu Yuan (343?–278 BCE), the poet who, according to legend, dove into the Miluo River to protest neglect and unjust treatment from his ruler. On such an occasion, there are dragon-boat races and some of the rice-cakes are thrown as sacrificial offerings into the water while others are eaten as steamed delicacies.

  5. Five Grand Deities: five gods of folk belief, all having to do with wealth. They are Zhao Xuantan , Zhaocai , Zhaobao , Lishi
, and Nazhen .

  6. Five Bureaus of the Three Realms: sanjie wusi , in which the three realms mean the entire “three-storied” universe. The Five Bureaus, also called the Five Norms or Wuzheng , are the designations of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth in high antiquity that later became the Officials of the Five Phases (). For their ancient names, see the Zuo Commentary, j 53 in SSJZS 2: 2123.

  7. Ten Quarters: the world of ten quarters or directions, shifang shijie . They are: east, south, west, north, southeast, southwest, northeast, northwest, above, and below.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  1. The brief exchange between Pilgrim and Guanyin’s attendant puns on the word gao, which can mean to report to, tell on, or to accuse in the legal sense of filing suit against someone.

  2. Three flowers: for the meaning of the metaphor, see JW 1, chapter 19, note 13.

  3. Four Greats: in Buddhism, the term usually refers to the four tanmātra or elements of earth, water, fire, and air (wind)—, , , —that join to form the human body (see the Avataṁsaka sūtra). When these elements are improperly balanced (thus the expression sida butiao ), all kinds of sicknesses will arise. See the Jingguangming zuishengwang jing (the Suvarṇaprabhāsayttana-rāja sūtra), j 5.

  4. As we have seen in the episode of chapters 44–46, JW 2, Daoist teachings on internal alchemy, in appropriation of certain crucial teminologies from traditional Chinese medical discourse, often use the metaphor of a frontier gate or a fortified pass (guan ) to refer to certain narrows or passageways of the human body.

  5. The change of voice here is intentional, since this section of the rescript has been added presumably by the queen of the State of Women in Western Liang.

  6. The great fishes change: an allusion to the opening words of Zhuangzi, j 1: “In the North Ocean there is a fish, its name is the K’un; the K’un’s girth measures who knows how many thousand miles. It changes into a bird, its name is the P’eng; the P’eng’s back measures who knows how many thousand miles.” See Chuang-tzǔ: The Seven Inner Chapters and other writings from the book Chuang-tzǔ, trans. A.C. Graham (London, 1981), p. 43.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  1. One body: yiti , of one essential nature despite external differentiation. The phrase is of classical vintage in both Chinese thought and in various Buddhist doctrines, but it is difficult to translate properly in English even in a specific context. The difficulty lies first in the linguistic problem that the binome, shenti , means the physical body in the modern vernacular. Classical Chinese before and during the imperial era used the first graph shen to indicate body, but often it meant self as well (e.g., Analects 1. 4), whereas the second graph ti could refer to both body parts (i.e., the limbs) and the notion of corporal vestige (e.g., “one’s physical body is the corporal vestige of father and mother , ”). See the chapter on “The Meaning of Sacrifice ,” in Record of Rites, j 48, in SSJZS 2: 1598b. Possibly from this usage and others, ti came to embody the idea of structural substance or essence (sameness but not identity?) despite difference, as found in the assertion: “Though the external shapes of the myriad things are diverse, their essential natures have a single structure , .” See The Annals of Lü Buwei , trans. John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel (Stanford, 2000), pp. 85–86. Since the arrival of both Indic languages and religions, textual translations have augmented the ontological overtones and implications in the graph ti. Modern Chinese, in fact, renders “ontology” as “bentilun .” Both early Buddhist scriptures and medieval Song Neo-Confucians debated at length the dialectics between “essential substance or structure, ti” and “external function, yong.” The introduction of post-Reformation Christianity to Ming China further complicated the graph’s meaning when it was used to translate the trinitarian formula of “three persons in one substance/essence” with the phrase, “sanwei yiti ,” in which ti was meant to represent the theological sense of the Greek ousia, essence. As used in the novel, yiti reflects again the Quanzhen tendency to appropriate verbatim certain key ideas of Buddhism, particularly as they are exploited in Chan discourse. In Buddhism, metaphysical speculations on the eternal Buddha contributed to the doctrine of the Buddha’s triple selves in one body (yiti sanshen ). They are the dharmakāya (fashen ) or the true, essential body; the sambhogakāya (baoshen ) or the body of reward or communal enjoyment; and the nirmānakāya (huashen ), the body of transformation. According to Kenneth Ch’en, “the body of essence is the only real body of the Buddha; this body connects and unites all the Buddhas of the past with those of the future. Though there are many Buddhas, there is only one body of essence. When the body of essence is called upon to fulfill the spiritual needs of the bodhisattvas, it then appears in the second form, the body of communal enjoyment. . . . Lastly, to explain the appearance of a Buddha like Śākyamuni among mankind, there is the body of transformation. The eternal body of essence creates a fictitious phantom of himself and causes this to appear among ignorant and wicked mankind in order to convert it.” See Buddhism in China, A Historical Survey (Princeton, 1964), p. 14. As further modified by Chan Buddhism, however, the doctrine proceeded to place greater emphasis on how the salvific “phantom Buddha” was nothing if not the same as the essentual nature of the individual human. Hence enlightenment or perdition are entirely self-realized, as the Platform Sūtra famously elaborates on the notion of “the one body and three selves of the self-natured Buddha, yiti sanshen zixing fo .” See # 2008 in T 48: 0354b. Deployed in the novel, “one body” can vary, referring to the corporate self of the five pilgrims or only one key individual like Sun Wukong. Thus, when he succeeded in enlisting the aid of the Buddha later in chapter 77 to subdue the great roc monster, Sun’s worshipful homage is interpreted in the last line of the titular couplet as, “One body [or the unified self] adores true Suchness .”

  2. Composite Prime: I follow Schafer, p. 28, in the translation of hunyuan .

  3. A reference to incidents recounted in chapters 30–31 of the full-length novel.

  4. For this episode, see JW 1, chapter 3.

  5. The Three Dukes are the three ministers of state.

  6. Holy babe: in alchemical discourse, realized immortality is often referred to as the baby boy (ying’er) or the holy embryo (shengtai). See JW 1, introduction IV.

  7. The name of this kind of monkey may be puzzling, but it may have been derived from the common Buddhist saying, “The dharma is not to be transmitted to the sixth ear [i.e., the third pair or person] .” This idiom is already used in chapter 2 when Monkey assured Patriarch Subhodi that he could receive the oral transmission of the secret formula for realized immortality because “there is no third party [sixth ear] present.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  1. Seed-natures: zhongxing , a Buddhist idiom meaning, literally, the natures of the seeds, in which nature implies inward uniformity, while the seeds indicate external differentiation through growth and transformation.

  2. The sea: an allusion to the Buddhist xinghai , in which the immaterial nature of the Dharmakāya is likened to a sea or ocean, the principled ultimacy of Suchness (lixing ) or bhūtatathatā . A term already well-known at the time of the historical Xuanzhang, it was used in one of the prefaces by the Palace Library’s Deputy Assistant () to praise the pilgrim’s monumental Record of the Western Territories of the Great Tang. Xuanzang’s writing, according to his eulogistic parallel prose, would “remove the multitudinous perplexities in the sea of Nature, and initiate mysterious awakening at the ford of delusion , .” See Jing Bo , “Da Tang Xiyuji xu ,” in Xinyi Da Tang Xiyuji (Taipei, 1998), p. 653. Perhaps echoing this use, the narrator of XYJ opens chapter 23 also with this description of the pilgrims: “Leaping clear from the sea of Nature’s flowing sand (), they were completely rid of any hindrance and proceeded westward on the main road.”

  3. The poem never identifies what is to be the object of the action of tightening, holding, picking, and safeguarding, thus necessitating my translation to use an ambiguous pronoun without proper antecedent. The whole lyri
c’s content, however, makes it clear that the poet is referring to the somatic substance and process essential to internal alchemy.

  4. The poem is a lyric written to the tune of “Wind Through the Pines” or alternately, “Horizontal Distant Hills.” I am indebted to Mr. Benjamin Chen, an alumnus friend of the University of Chicago and a poet of classical Chinese verse, for the tune’s identification.

  5. This lyric is written to the tune of “The Barbarian Bodhisattva.”

  6. Sūrya Kingdom: the Chinese in the text reads Sihali guo [kingdom] , which seems to be meaningless. Since Sūrya means the sun, I feel that the minor emendation is perhaps warranted.

  7. Gonggong : in Chinese, the binome can mean the paternal grandfather or (in some dialects) the maternal one, or any male addressed in a deferential manner. I have decided to keep the original, as with popo.

  8. Rākṣasī: , literally means female demons. The XYJ author may be punning with the term intentionally, or he may lack understanding of its proper significance.

  9. See JW 2, chapters 40–42.

  10. See chapter 53, current volume.

  11. This is another lyric written to the tune of “Moon Over West River.”

  12. See JW 1, chapter 3.

  13. See JW 1, chapters 19–20.

  14. Snack: Pilgrim is punning here on the Chinese term for snack or pastry (dianxin ). Literally, the term means touching the heart, and it is popularized globally today in restaurants serving “dim sum,” the Cantonese articulation of the term.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  1. See JW 1, chapters 7–8 for these incidents.

  2. Wang Qiang: the name of Wang Zhaojun, the legendary court beauty of Han who was sent to marry a Xiongnu chieftain.

  3. Wenjun: this is Zhuo Wenjun , a beautiful widow who was moved to elope with her lover, Sima Xiangru , because of his fine music-making on a stringed instrument. See Records of the Historian , j 117, in Ershiwushi 1: 0254 c–d. Xue Tao (768–833), a famous courtesan of the Tang, who was reputed to be a gifted poet, an inventive paper manufacturer, and an intimate friend of such literati scholars as Yuan Zhen, Bo Juyi, and Du Mu (all late eighth- and early ninth-century poets). For a sample of her poems, see Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism, eds. Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy (Stanford, 1999), pp. 59–66.