by Unknown
On the other hand, the śāstra, though also a Mahāyānist text, belongs to the Yogācāra school of Indian idealism, and it stresses what may be called a more elitist view of salvation.8 In the biography, Xuanzang is depicted as not only a specially able exponent of this text, but also as deeply vexed by the question of whether all men, or only part of humanity, could attain Buddhahood. It was to resolve this particular question as well as other textual and doctrinal perplexities that he decided to make what would become the famous pilgrimage to India. Years later, when he was touring the land of the faith, he prayed before a famous image of Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara) on his way to Bengal, and his three petitions were: to have a safe and easy journey back to China, to be reborn in Lord Maitreya’s palace as a result of the knowledge he gained, and to be personally assured that he would become a Buddha since the holy teachings claimed that not all men had the Buddha-nature.9
As he studied with various masters in China during his youth, Xuanzang became convinced that unless the encyclopedic Yogā-cārya-bhūmi śāstra (Yujia shidi lun ), the foundational text of this school of Buddhism, became available, the other idealistic texts could not be properly understood. He resolved to go to India, but the application made by him and other Buddhist companions to the imperial court for permission to travel was refused. “At this time,” declares his official biography, “the state’s governance was new and its frontiers did not reach far. The people were prohibited from going to foreign domains.” The second emperor of the Tang dynasty, Taizong (r. 627–649), had just assumed his title, but this man had usurped the throne by ambushing and murdering his two brothers and possibly even his own father, incidents unmistakably recalled in the novelistic episode on the emperor’s tour of the underworld (chapter 11).10 Because the slain brothers were stationed near the western frontier, loyal troops likely became restive when news of their commanders’ death had reached them. The court’s refusal to permit free passage to the western territories was thus understandable and received immediate and unquestioned obedience by Xuanzang’s companions. Xuanzang, however, was of a different cast of mind. Emboldened by an auspicious dream in which he saw himself crossing a vast ocean treading on sprouting lotus leaves and uplifted to the peak of the sacred Sumeru Mountain by a powerful breeze, the young priest defied the imperial prohibition and set out, probably late in 627, by joining in secret a merchant caravan. This one exercise of personal religious commitment had, in fact, rendered the youthful pilgrim guilty of high treason, liable to immediate execution if caught by the authorities, but the transgressive and highly dangerous border crossing to exit Tang territory was successful.11
Sustaining appalling obstacles and hardships, Xuanzang traversed Turfan, Darashar, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bactria, Kapisa, and Kashmir, until he finally reached the Magadha Kingdom of mid-India (now Bodhgaya) around 631. Here he studied with the aged Silabhadra (Jiexian ) in the great Nālandā Monastery for five years—in three different periods separating his wide travels throughout the land of his faith. He visited many sacred sites, and, according to his biographers, expounded the Dharma before kings, priests, and laymen. Heretics and brigands alike were converted by his preaching, and scholastics were defeated in debates with him. To honor him, Indian Buddhists bestowed on him the titles Mahāyāna-deva (, the Celestial Being of the Great Vehicle) and Mokṣa-deva (, a Celestial Being of Deliverance). After sixteen years, in 643, he began his homeward trek, taking the wise precaution while en route in Turfan the following year of requesting in writing an imperial pardon for leaving China without permission.12 Readily absolved by Taizong, who often owed his own rise to power to the decisive support of Buddhists on several occasions, Xuanzang arrived at the capital, Chang’an, in the first month of 645, bearing some 657 items (bu) of Buddhist scriptures. The emperor was away in the eastern capital, Luoyang, preparing for his campaign against Koguryŏ (the modern Korea).
In the following month, Xuanzang proceeded to Luoyang, where emperor and pilgrim finally met. More interested in “the rulers, the climate, the products, and the customs in the land of India to the west of the Snowy Peaks” (FSZ, j 6) than in the fine points of doctrinal development, Taizong was profoundly impressed by the priest’s vast knowledge of foreign cultures and peoples. The emperor’s appointive offer was declined; instead, Xuanzang declared his resolve to devote his life to the translation of sūtras and śāstras. The monk was first installed in the Hongfu Monastery and subsequently in the Ci’en Monastery of Chang’an, the latter edifice having been built by the crown prince (later, emperor Gaozong) in memory of his mother. Supported by continuous royal favors and a large staff of some of the most able Buddhist clerics of the empire, Xuanzang spent the next nineteen years of his life translating and writing. By the time he died in 664, at the age of about seventy, he had completed translations of seventy-five scriptures in 1,347 scroll-volumes (juan), including the lengthy Yogācārya-bhūmi śāstra for which Taizong wrote in commendation the famous Shengjiao xu (Preface to the Holy Religion). Among Xuanzang’s own writings, his Cheng weishi lun (Treatise on the Establishment of the Consciousness-Only System) and the Da Tang Xiyuji (The Record of the Great Tang’s Western Territories) were the best known, the first being an elaborate and subtle exposition of the Trimsika by Vasubandhu and a synthesis of its ten commentaries, and the latter a descriptive and anecdotal travelogue sometimes called the first Chinese work of geography dictated to the disciple Bianji (d. 649).
This brief sketch of Xuanzang and account of his life, as told by his biographers, have much of the engaging blend of facts and fantasies, of myth and history, out of which fictions are made. There should be no surprise, therefore, that his exploits were soon incorporated into the biographical sections (liezhuan) of such a standard dynastic history as the Jiu Tangshu , although even this brief entry of no more than 362 characters was excised later by the poet-official and ardent Confucian Ouyang Xiu (1007–72) in the Xin Tangshu , his authorized revision of canonical history.13 Despite this early instance of political censorship, the story of Xuanzang’s life was celebrated repeatedly by both classical and demotic literary writings. Visual and iconographic depictions of this specific but imagined pilgrimage also could be found on wall murals and relief sculptures of varying geographical sites (some found on or near the northwestern silk route, while others in the southeastern coastal region), the earliest ones possibly dating to the late Tang.14 Yet, it must be pointed out that the Xuanzang story—as finally told in the hundred-chapter narrative published in 1592 and titled Xiyouji (literally, the Record of the Westward Journey) of which the present work is a complete translation—and the historical Xuanzang have only the most tenuous relation. In nearly a millennium of evolution, the story of Tang Sanzang (Tripitaka, the honorific name of Xuanzang to commemorate his acquisition of Buddhist scriptures) and his journey to the West has been told by both pen and mouth and through a variety of literary forms which have included the short poetic tale, the drama, and finally the fully developed narrative using both prose and verse. In this long process of development, the theme of the pilgrimage for scriptures is never muted, but added to this basic constituent of the story are numerous features which have more in common with folktales, legends, religious lore, and creative fiction than with history. The account of a courageous monk’s undertaking, motivated by profound religious zeal and commitment in defiance of imperial proscription, is actually displaced and eventually transformed into a tale of supernatural deeds and fantastic adventures, of mythic beings and animal spirits, of fearsome battles with monsters and miraculous deliverances from dreadful calamities. How all this came about is a study in itself, but a pioneering effort had been undertaken by Glen Dudbridge in his authoritative The Hsi-yu chi: A Study of Antecedents to the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel.15 Supplemented by later scholarship written in Chinese and other languages, I shall review briefly only the most important literary versions of the westward journey prior to the late Ming narrative before proceeding to discuss the cultural ma
terials specific to the hundred-chapter novel.
Between the time of the historical Xuanzang and the first literary version of his journey for which we have solid documentary evidence, there are a few scattered indications that fragments of the pilgrim’s story and exploits were working their way already into late Tang poetry and anecdotal writings. In the biography, the monk is represented as having a special fondness for the Heart Sūtra (the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya), a very short text which he himself later translated, for it was by reciting it and by calling upon Guanyin that he found deliverance from dying of thirst and from hallucinations in the desert (FSZ, j 1).16 By the time of the Taiping guangji , the encyclopedic anthology of anecdotes and miscellaneous tales compiled in 976–83, the brief account of Xuanzang contained therein already included the motif of the pilgrim’s special relation with the sūtra. There we are told that an old monk, his face covered with sores and his body with pus and blood, was the one who had transmitted this sūtra to the pilgrim, for whom, “when he recited it, the mountains and the streams became traversable, and the roads were made plain and passable; tigers and leopards vanished from sight; demons and spirits disappeared. He thus reached the land of Buddha” (TPGJ, j 92, 10: 606). During the next century, Ouyang Xiu recalled drinking one night at the Shouling Monastery in Yangzhou. He was told by an old monk there that when the place was used as a traveling palace by the Later Zhou emperor Shizong (r. 954–59), all the murals were destroyed except an exquisite one on one wall that depicted the story of Xuanzang’s journey in quest of the scriptures.17
These two references, while clearly pointing to popular interest in the story, provide us with scant information on how this story has been told. The first representation of a distinctive tale with certain characteristic figures and episodes appears, as Dudbridge puts it, “almost without warning.” Two texts preserved in Japanese collections, which contain minor linguistic discrepancies but which recount essentially the same story, have been dated by most scholars as products of the thirteenth century: Xindiao Da Tang Sanzang Fashi qujingji (The Newly Printed Record of the Procurement of Scriptures by the Master of the Law, Tripitaka, of the Great Tang) and the Da Tang Sanzang qujing shihua (The Poetic Tale of the Procurement of Scriptures by Tripitaka of the Great Tang). Originally belonging to the monastery Kōzanji northwest of Kyoto, these texts finally gained public attention upon their publication earlier in the twentieth century.18
As some of the earliest examples of printed popular fiction in China, the texts have deservedly attracted widespread scholarly interest and scrutiny, even though they in no way can be considered the “blueprint” for emplotting the hundred-chapter novel published some four centuries later.19 As far as we know at present, they may have been the first to depict Xuanzang’s pilgrimage as fiction, inaugurating the imaginative elaboration of the Tripitaka legend. The brief poetic tale of seventeen sections (with section 1 missing in both texts), narrated by prose interlaced with verse written mostly in the form of the heptasyllabic quatrain or jueju , tells of Xuanzang’s journey through such mythic and fantastic regions as the palace of Mahābrahmā Devarāja, the Long Pit and the Great Serpent Range, the Nine Dragon Pool, the kingdoms of Guizimu, Women, Poluo, and Utpala Flowers, and the Pool of Wangmu (Queen Mother of the West) before his arrival in India. After procuring some 5,048 juan of Buddhist scriptures, Xuanzang returns to the Xianglin Monastery, where he is taught the Heart Sūtra by the Dīpaṁkara Buddha. On his way back to the region of Shaanxi, the pilgrim avenges the crime of a stepmother’s murder of her son by splitting open a large fish and restoring the child to life. When he reaches the capital, the priest is met by the emperor and given the title “Master Tripitaka,” after which the pilgrim and his companions are conveyed by celestial vehicles to Heaven.
A primitive version of the Xiyouji story hardly to be compared with the scope and complexity of the hundred-chapter narrative, the poetic tale nonetheless vindicates its importance by introducing a number of themes or episodes expanded and developed in subsequent literary treatments of the same story. These themes may be summarized as follows:
1. The Monkey Disciple or Acolyte (Skt. ācārin, hou xingzhe ) as protector and guide of Xuanzang (section 2 and passim) who gains the title Great Sage (Dasheng ) at the end (section 17).
2. The gifts of the Mahābrahmā Devarāja: an invisible hat, a golden-ringed priestly staff, and an almsbowl (section 2; cf. JW, chapters 8 and 12, for the gifts to Xuanzang from Buddha and from the emperor).
3. The snow-white skeleton (section 6; cf. JW, chapters 27–31, the Cadaver Monster? or chapter 50).
4. Monkey’s defeat of the White Tiger spirit through invasion of its belly (section 6; cf. JW, chapters 59, 75, and 82, for similar feats of Monkey).
5. The Deep-Sand God as possible ancestor of Sha Monk of the Ming narrative (section 8; JW, chapter 22).20
6. The Kingdom of Guizimu (section 9; cf. scene 12 of the twenty-four-act drama also titled Xiyouji, and chapter 42 of JW).21
7. The Kingdom of Women, where Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra appear as temptresses (section 10; cf. JW, chapters 23, 53–54).
8. The reference to Monkey’s theft of immortal peaches and his capture by Wangmu (section 11; cf. JW, chapter 5).
9. The reference to the ginseng fruit and its childlike features (section 11; cf. JW, chapters 24–26).
Among the themes which appeared in the Song poetic tale, the introduction of a Monkey acolyte or disciple as the human pilgrim’s lasting companion surely ranks as a highly significant one. Disguised as a white-robed scholar that Xuanzang met on the way, this simian figure anticipates in some ways the powerful, resourceful, and heroic Sun Wukong of XYJ. The place that Monkey claims to be his home is mentioned in exactly the same manner again in the much later twenty-four-scene drama version of the story (the Purple-Cloud Cave of the Flower-Fruit Mountain), while XYJ retains only the name of the mountain and bestows a new name (Water Curtain) to the cave dwelling. Throughout the tale, he is presented as both a past delinquent and a dedicated guardian who will deliver Xuanzang from his preordained afflictions during the pilgrimage.
In the biography of the historical monk, he was not accompanied on his journey by any supernatural beings, let alone animal figures. The tantalizingly cryptic reference (“Procurement of scriptures one owes to a monkey acolyte ”) in a line of poetry by the Song poet, Liu Kezhuang (1187–1269) on Buddists and Daoists, gives an early hint of the animal figure’s association with a scripture pilgrimage, but it neither explains the reason of this association nor identifies Xuanzang as the pilgrim.22 The carved monkey figure located at the Kaiyuan si of Quanzhou (Zayton), completed some time in 1237, is also, according to the description of G. Ecke and P. Demiéville,23 identified by that temple tradition as Sun Wukong, though the depiction differs significantly from the novelistic figure’s clothing and weapons.24 Neither of these “sources,” however, really explains how a popular religious folk hero such as Xuanzang has come to acquire this animal attendant, who gains steadily in popularity in subsequent literary accounts until finally, in the hundred-chapter narrative, he almost completely overshadows his master.
It is to the search for the possible origin of this fascinating figure and the reasons for his associations with, and prominence within, the Tripitaka legend that Dudbridge devotes all of his investigation in the second half of his study. The literary works which he examines in detail range from early prose tales of a white ape figure (the Tang Baiyuan zhuan and the vernacular mid-Ming short story Chen Xunjian Meiling shiqiji ),25 to Ming dramas such as the Erlang shen suo Qitian Dasheng , Erlang shen zuishe suomojing , Menglie Nezha san bianhua , Guankou Erlang zhan jianjiao , and the Longji shan yeyuan ting jing .26 None of these works, however, can be shown decisively to be a “source” for the derivation of the later full-length novel. As Dudbridge sees the matter, the essential role of the white ape emerging from the tales under consideration is one of abductor and seducer of women, a characteristic foreign to the Monkey
of the Xiyouji. In his opinion, “Tripitaka’s disciple commits crimes which are mischievous and irreverent, but the white ape is from first to last a monstrous creature which has to be eliminated. The two acquire superficial points of similarity when popular treatments of the respective traditions, in each case of Ming date, coincide in certain details of nomenclature.”27 That might well have been the case, or it might have been that there were two related traditions concerning the monkey figure: one which emphasizes the monkey as a demon, evil spirit, and recreant in need of suppression by the warrior god Erlang or Naṭa as in the Qitian Dasheng plays, and one which portrays the monkey as capable of performing religious deeds as in the tingjing accounts. Both strands of the tradition might in turn feed into the evolving Xiyouji cycle of stories.28
In addition to these literary texts, the figure of Wuzhiqi , the water fiend, has provided many scholars with a prototype of Sun Wukong, mainly because he, too, was a monster whose delinquent behavior led to his imprisonment beneath a mountain, first by the legendary King Yu, the conqueror of the primeval flood in China, and then again by Guanyin.29 However, Dudbridge points out that such a theory involves the identification of Sun Wukong as originally a water demon and his early association with the Erlang cult of Sichuan, neither of which assumptions finds apparent support in the Kōzanji text.30 It may be added that Wuzhiqi, though certainly known to the novel’s author (he was referred to in chapter 66 as the Water Ape Great Sage [Shuiyuan dasheng ]), has been kept quite distinct from the monkey hero. One of Sun Wukong’s specific weaknesses consistently emphasized in XYJ is that he loses much of his power and adroitness once he enters water (e.g., chapter 22). On the other hand, the novelistic simian hero’s one most positive association with water also links him distantly to Wuzhiqi, because the mighty iron rod that has become part of Sun Wukong’s trademark identity since chapter 3 is originally a divine ruler by which King Yu fixed the proper depths of rivers and seas when subduing the flood.