by Unknown
“Ape-head!” snapped Tripitaka. “How dare you say that I don’t know its interpretation! Do you?”
“Yes, I know its interpretation!” replied Pilgrim. After that exchange, neither Tripitaka nor Pilgrim uttered another word, [thereby inviting raucous teasing from the other two disciples, Zhu Eight Rules and Sha Monk, that Monkey was no seminarian and knew nothing of scriptural interpretation. Then the master spoke].
“Wuneng and Wujing,” said Tripitaka, “stop this claptrap! Wukong made his interpretation in a speechless language. That’s true interpretation.” (XYJ, chapter 93, pp. 1050–51)
The colloquy here makes apparent that Tripitaka “got it right,” so to speak, after his Monkey disciple provided an appropriately symbolic medium of wordlessness to remind his master not to chatter and complain endlessly and still reciting a scripture that powerfully affirms the vacuity of all phenomena and all sense perceptions (see JW, chapter 19, for a full citation of the sūtra as translated by the historical Xuanzang).
As another example of Chan motifs in XYJ, an even earlier episode anticipated this part of the story, when master and disciple take up another discussion of the sūtra. In chapter 43 (XYJ, p. 494) when on their journey the sound of rushing water as usual alarmed the human pilgrim, Monkey had to give him another lesson on what it meant to transcend sensory turmoil:
Old Master, . . . you have quite forgotten again the Heart Sūtra. . . . You have forgotten the sentence about “no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind.” Those of us monks who have left our own family should see no form with our eyes, should hear no sound with our ears, should smell no smell with our noses, should taste no taste with our tongues; our bodies should have no knowledge of heat or cold, and our minds should gather no vain thoughts. This is called the extermination of the Six Robbers.
Sun Wukong, in fact, is reminding his master of events in chapter 14 immediately after he was released from the Mountain of Five Phases to make submission to Tripitaka, when his slaying of six brigands with his rod becomes a literalized narration of the lesson expounded here.
The conversation between master and disciple indicates that the human monk was still slow to learn how to control his bodily senses through his mind. The narrative later provides a similar dialogue in which the disciple teaches the master (XYJ, chapter 85, p. 966). When Tripitaka complained that the sight of “a precipitous mountain with violent vapors and savage clouds soaring up” had unsettled him, Monkey accused him of again forgetting the scripture. Rebuking further the master’s denial, his disciple said that even with the knowledge of the sūtra, Tripitaka would need to recall this gāthā:
Seek not afar for Buddha on Spirit Mount;
Mount Spirit dwells only inside your mind.
There’s in each man a Spirit Mount stūpa:
Beneath this stūpa you must be refined.
“Disciple,” said Tripitaka, “you think I don’t know this? According to these four lines, the lesson of all scriptures concerns only the cultivation of the mind.”
“Of course, that goes without saying,” said Pilgrim. “For when the mind is pure, it shines forth as a solitary lamp, and when the mind is secure, the entire phenomenal world becomes clarified. The tiniest error, however, makes for the way to slothfulness, and then you’ll never succeed even in ten thousand years. Maintain your vigilance with the utmost sincerity, and Thunderclap will be right before your eyes. But when you afflict yourself like that with fears and troubled thoughts, then the Great Way and, indeed, Thunderclap seem far away.”
This passage is probably one of the most significant ones in the entire narrative for several reasons: it enables the educated reader to see (1) that the journey to the West is not just a physical trek but symbolizes something else; (2) that the sum of scriptural doctrine unanimously affirmed by master and disciple concerns the cultivation of mind; and (3) that the author, through his invented character, has no reservation in advancing patent religious syncretism in his fiction by adding a poetic commentary that, formally speaking, is quite alien to the Buddhist sūtra.
It is no accident that the pilgrimage, as many readers have remarked, gradually and surely acquires a highly symbolic, even allegorical, meaning in the novel. Whereas the biographical accounts of the historical monk all tend to dwell on the literal variety of places and kingdoms the pilgrim visited, the novel progressively renders the journey as one of paradoxical doubleness: great distance and immediate traversal. As early as when he first joined the pilgrimage, Sun Wukong gave his human master a succinct lecture about the journey’s meaning:
You can walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you become youthful again; and even after going through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it difficult to reach the place where you want to go to. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your will, the Buddha-nature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to its very source in your memory, that will be the time you arrive at the Spirit Mountain , , . (XYJ, chapter 24, p. 270)
What is even more astonishing about this affirmation of “sudden enlightenment” redolent of one of Chan’s key doctrines is the setting of Monkey’s little lecture. After all, the Platform Sūtra asserts repeatedly, “To see the Western Region takes only an instant ” (Tanjing, chapter 3, p. 78). Immediately before Sun Wukong spoke, Sha Monk asked him just how far it was to Thunderclap Temple, the abode of Buddha. Monkey’s reply was: “One hundred and eight thousand miles .” As any reader will remember, this is the distance covered by the magic of one cloud somersault that Monkey had learned from Patriarch Subodhi in chapter 2 (XYJ, p. 18). That was why he could boast to his fellow disciple, the Pig Eight Rules Zhu, when they were stranded at the Flowing-Sand River (chapter 22, p. 249), that if it were only he who had to journey to see Buddha, all he had to do was “to nod his head twice and stretch his waist once.” The great distance would be covered in an instant. Is there any particular significance to the number of miles? Here is the answer from the Platform Scripture (section 35, p. 91–92):
If the mind is absolutely pure, the Western Region is not far away. But if one’s mind is not pure, it will be difficult to go and be born there through reciting the name of the Buddha. If one has removed the Ten Evils, he will have traveled a hundred thousand miles, and if one is free from the Eight Perversions, he will have traveled eight thousand miles. (see also the Tanjing, chapter 3, p. 77)
Monkey’s use of a quatrain as a gāthā to amplify the meaning of both mind cultivation and the journey’s symbolic distance, however, does not, as far as we know, stem directly from a Chan Buddhist source. It derives from a noncanonical Daoist text that integrates certain Chan concepts and terms with Quanzhen doctrines. Completely subscribing to the hermeneutical principles practiced by those advocating the unity of the Three Religions, the book titled Xingming guizhi (Talismanic Directives to the Cultivation of Nature and Vitality) “is a comprehensive neidan [internal or physiological alchemy] text dating from the Ming period.”136 In the section on “Nourishing the Fundamental Origin ,” we read the following:
The Confucians call it “Spirit Terrace” [or Estrade]; the Daoists call it “Spirit Pass”: and the Buddhists call it “Spirit Mountain.” The Three Religions belong to the same Dharma Gate, and all [their doctrines] are not beyond this one aperture to spiritual enlightenment. The Buddhist Religion says: “Seek not afar for Buddha on Spirit Mount; . . . / Beneath this stūpa you must be refined” , , , , . , / / / . (XMGZ 9: 532; XMGZ-Taipei, pp. 146–47)
Neither the novel XYJ nor this Daoist treatise identifies the source of this poem or which one of our texts might have been quoting the other. Nevertheless, such evidence indicates our novel is steeped in a cultural milieu that affirms the Three Religions as belonging to the same fold in practice and belief.
That impression, in turn, should enable us to see as well why the novel has provided its human protagonist, for all his reputed learning in Buddhism and habitual rehearsal of
Confucian pieties, a monkey-tutor who, as many readers (including Mao Zedong) would argue, is the true hero of the novel. Although Tripitaka might be able to declare in chapter 85 that “the lesson of all scriptures [presumably including those he was still seeking] concerns only the cultivation of the mind,” it is the novel’s author who gave him a disciple and companion that incarnates mind itself. The figure of Sun Wukong, as conceived and developed throughout the book, brilliantly embodies the venerable idiom, “the monkey of the mind.”
It is no accident that a narrative ostensibly devoted to Xuanzang’s pilgrimage would begin with seven chapters focused solely on an imagined figure, a capacious structural feature found only in the 1592 novel. This part of the story concerns a different quest: “the sprouting of [Monkey’s] religious inclination ” in chapter 1 that leads to his search for the Way and its eventual acquisition . When he succeeds in the first stage of learning the secret of realized immortality from the Patriarch Subhodi, the narration’s emphasis (chapter 2) at first seems to accentuate his superhuman powers and physical transformation: “I left weighed down by bones of mortal stock. / The Dao attained makes light both body and frame” (XYJ, chapter 1, p. 20; JW 1: 125). At the height of his battle in Heaven, however, the couplet opening one of the three commentarial verses in chapter 7 I cited earlier refines and deepens the polysemia of the Monkey figure: “An ape’s body of Dao weds the human mind. / Mind is a monkey—this meaning’s profound / ” (XYJ, chapter 1, p. 79; JW 1: 190). Because the Monkey of the Mind was a stock idiom common to Buddhist and Daoist usage long before the novel appeared, most readers past and present have passed over the puns and metaphors in these lines without exploring further how skillfully this seemingly trite appellation has acquired new meaning in the entire work.
The narrative context of this poem is when Monkey will soon face the comic but disastrous wager with Buddha himself, who addresses his insolent opponent as “only a monkey who happened to become a spirit, . . . merely a beast who has just attained human form in this incarnation” (XYJ, chapter 7, pp. 81–82; JW 1: 193), or, as he tags him elsewhere, a bogus immortal (yaoxian ). In the religio-magical cosmos presumed by the full-length novel, the attainment of magical or transcendent powers (de Dao) is open to both humans and such nonhumans as plants, animals, rocks, and mountains, or fans, swords, and lutes. But the process also entails a form of hierarchy more consonant with conventional Confucian values: for nonhumans, the goal of their first stage must be the acquisition of human speech, manners, and other characteristics of human culture. That was what Monkey learned in chapter 1, whereas the giant white turtle of chapter 49 acquired speech but not human form (or he would have shed his shell), and the giant python monster of chapter 67 could not even speak. We might well ask whether the Monkey of the first seven chapters has truly attained unity with the human heart-and-mind on his initiation at the Mountain of Heart and Mind, or only with his submission to Tripitaka, in the episode titled “The Monkey of the Mind Returns to the Right ” (chapter 14). In any case, Monkey’s experience in the cave and his receipt from Subhodi of the secrets of alchemy and immortality ought not to be slighted, because the names of the mountain and the cave complement his first conversation with the patriarch.
“What is your family name [xing ]?” The Monkey King again replied, “I have no nature [xing ]. If a man rebukes me, I am not offended; if he hits me, I am not angered. . . . My whole life’s without ill temper.” “I’m not speaking of your temper,” the Patriarch said, “I’m asking after the name of your parents.” “I have no parents either,” said the Monkey King. “. . . I recall there used to be an immortal stone on the Flower-Fruit Mountain. I was born in the year when it split open.”
When the Patriarch heard this, he was secretly pleased . . . and said, “though your features are not the most attractive, you do resemble a pignolia-eating monkey (husun ). This gives me the idea of taking a surname for you from your appearance. I intended to call you the name ‘Hu .’ Now, if I drop the animal radical from this word, what’s left is a compound made up of the two characters, gu and yue . Gu means aged and yue means female, but an aged female cannot reproduce.
Therefore it is better to give you the surname of ‘Sun.’ If I drop the animal radical from this word, what we have left is the compound of zi and xi . Zi means a boy and xi means a baby, and that name exactly accords with the Doctrine of the Baby Boy. So your surname will be ‘Sun .’”
When the Monkey King heard this, he was filled with delight. “Splendid! Splendid!” he cried, kowtowing. “At last I know my name” . . . . Laughing, the Patriarch [also] said, “You will hence be given the religious name Wake-to-the-Void (Wukong).” (XYJ, chapter 1, pp. 11–12; JW 1: 114–15)
This name Wukong (Wake-to-the-Void, ) brings quickly to mind such concepts as śūnya, śūnyatā, and māyā in Buddhism, which point to the emptiness, the vacuity, and the unreality of all things and all physical phenomena. These are, in fact, cardinal doctrines of the Yogācāra school of which the historical Xuanzang himself, as we have seen, is an able exponent. It is not without reason, therefore, that when the fictive Tripitaka first learns of Monkey’s name in chapter 14, he exclaims with pleasure, “It exactly fits the emphasis of our lineage.”
The person who made the observation, we also know, is not the historical Xuanzang, and one could justly question at this point whether “our lineage” refers to the Faxiang or Consciousness-Only variety or another tradition infiltrated hugely by Chan and Quanzhen notions. The earlier chitchat between Subhodi and his student with all that punning amidst etymological and anagrammatic analysis of a few Chinese graphs may sound almost vaudevillian. But to a reader alert to both context and the thin veil of allegory, the cave’s name and this small episode add up to an important slogan endlessly proclaimed by both Chan Buddhism and Quanzhen Daoism: the attainment of Buddhahood or enlightenment depends on one’s “illiminating the mind and seeing one’s own nature [as Buddha’s and hence one’s own original nature], mingxin jianxing .” Hence the key Chan Buddhist scripture declares: “Each should view one’s mind so that each should see one’s own nature. . . . If one understands one’s own nature, the very moment of awakening would make one arrive [in] the land of Buddha , . . . . ” (Tanjing, chapter 2, p. 39). This is the lesson of the novel that the powerful recalcitrant ape tries to teach his master.
To understand the relationship between Xuanzang and his simian disciple is already to follow the insight of readers from the Ming to contemporary scholars that one principal subject of the novel, as summarized by even Tripitaka himself, irrefutably focuses on the cultivation of heart-and-mind, a subject that has been prevalent in the discourse of philosophical elites like the Neo-Confucians from Song to Ming and in the idioms and jargons of pedestrian morality advocates and even popular entertainers. The pithiness of this abstract term of cultivation, however, may prevent us from seeing the multiplicity of its meaning that finds such ingenious deployment in the novel. Although Xuanzang before the pilgrimage (chapter 13) can already assert that “when the mind is active, all kinds of māra come into existence; when the mind is extinguished, all kinds of māra will be extinguished , ; , ” (XYJ, p. 143; JW 1: 294), his experience throughout the journey reveals that such a declaration for him at the time seems no more than a rote paraphrase of similar ideas in many Buddhist writings (e.g., “, ”), especially those associated with the Chan sect.137 For him—and the readers as well—to learn the full implications of such a doctrine will require the journey’s eighty-one ordeals no less than Tripitaka’s unquestioned unanimity with his mind-monkey, at once his teacher and his disciple. Tripitaka must let the mind of Monkey become his mind so that he may “wake to the void.” Without this transformative union and vision, he will regard a monster like the Red Boy as a good person (chapters 40–42) and see the specious Thunderclap Monastery as the real one (chapters 65–67).
This central paradox, as it finds narrative exposition and enactment in the novel, thus perforce depart
s from the kind of syncretic idealism of a Neo-Confucian Wang Shouren (Yangming , 1472–1529). Although that Ming philosopher admits that “the lessons of Chan and of the Sages are all about cultivating to the limit of one’s heart-and-mind , ,” and that Confucianism differs from Chan Buddhism only with a hair’s breadth (“”), Wang’s patently Mencian diction nevertheless clings to a traditional critique of Buddhism for “ignoring canonical human relations, abandoning affairs and things [of the world] . . . , and fostering selfishness and self-benefit , . . . . .”138 By contrast, the novel’s unapologetic religious orientation now seeks to unite Buddhist and Confucian precepts in a markedly different manner. The fictive Xuanzang is first presented as someone with impeccable credentials of a loyal subject and filial son, but even though he has not ignored human relations, he must still learn the truth adumbrated in chapter 14’s prefatorial poem—“The Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is Mind ”139—a chapter ending dramatically with Monkey’s thunderous clamor that his Master has arrived at last to set him free. Reading through the novel’s entire length, it is plain that what the fictive Xuanzang must learn is to hold fast constantly to the doctrines of the loftiest idealism or mentalism enshrined in the Heart Sūtra (chapters 32 and 85). Even more painfully, he—and the readers, too—must realize, through the seemingly violent but repeated episodes of eliminating the Six Robbers (chapters 14 and 56), that the cherished, inviolable Law of the monk’s faith (the Buddhist commandment not to take life) is itself contradictory. For this imperative as such is also fundamentally empty and thus requires noetic transcendence in the very process of self-cultivation.
The Heart-and-Mind that must be consulted and utilized thus dialectically needs also to be controlled or harnessed , as every reader who encounters the Tight-Fillet episodes would realize. Moreover, Monkey’s own experience as the Tang Monk’s disciple mirrors his master’s experience, one constituted by a series of imprisonment and release, harmonious integration and disastrous dissolution, epitomized in the idiom, “to subdue or release the Monkey of the Mind ,” a phrase that echoes the alleged dicta on the novel by the Yuan scholar Yu Ji discussed in part II of this introduction: that the book “is all about the retrieval or release of one’s mind.” The Monkey of the Mind, xinyuan, may well be read as a pun on xinyuan , or mental wish. Both the metaphoric name itself and the need to control the mind have filled the discourses of both Buddhism and Quanzhen Daoism.140 Most importantly, physical pain and mental anguish persistently accompany the human pilgrim no less than his devoted disciple on this journey. In this sense, the enlistment of a monkey acolyte as the most appropriate guardian and guide for the human monks cannot be adequately explained alone by reference to literary antecedents. The profoundly creative author of the hundred-chapter novel has transmuted a banal idiom into the unprecedented and unrivalled character Sun Wukong. The language and emplotment of the narrative more than once suggest that the monkey is a part of Tripitaka himself.141 This kind of symbolic or allegorical union of two figures, objects, or even two bodily parts or organs may certainly find suggestive precedent in both Chan and Daoist writings. In the words of a contemporary scholar,