by Unknown
Xiyou yuanzhi , ed. Liu Yiming (1734–1821). His original preface is dated to 1798, but the extant earliest printed edition bears the date of 1810. It has one-hundred chapters but is somewhat abridged. Liu was also a fairly well-known Daoist and a practicing physiological alchemist. Commentary indicates direct descent from the tradition of Quanzhen doctrines, further enhanced by various tenets advanced by the Three-Religions-in-One movement. See ET 1: 690–91. For this edition of the XYJ, Liu wrote a prefatorial “Dufa , A Guide to Reading,” which has been translated into English by Anthony C. Yu, with further annotations by David Rolston. See How to Read the Chinese Novel, ed. David L. Rolston (Princeton, 1990), pp. 295–315.
Tongyi Xiyou zhengzhi , one-hundred chapters with anonymous preface and postface, 1839.
Xiyouji pingzhu , its commentator identified as Hanjingzi , with preface dated to 1891. It has one-hundred chapters but likely it is a reduced version of the Xiyou yuanzhi. For a detailed listing of the premodern editions of XYJ along with modern Chinese printed versions (commercial and academic) and selected foreign translations (up to the mid-1970s), see XYJTY 1:41–71.
69. See my “Narrative Structure and the Problem of Chapter Nine in the Xiyouji,” JAS 34 (1975): 295–311, reprinted in CJ, pp. 108–28.
70. Guanglu is likely not a real name of Mr. Tang but the professional title or rank of office. According to Professor Cao Bingjian, “Xin faxian de Xiyouji ziliao . . . ,” p. 135, citing, in turn, the preface in Huang Yongnian and Huang Zhouxing , Huang Zhouxing Dingben “Xiyouji” (Beijing, 1998), it may well have referred to the office of Chief Minister (qing ) belonging to the Court of Imperial Entertainments, Guanglu si , “in charge of catering for the imperial household, court officials, and imperial banquets honoring foreign envoys and other dignitaries.” See Hucker, # 3348, p. 288. If this is the case, Tang Guanglu might have been a nomenclature similar to something like “Secretary Clinton.”
71. See Wu Cheng’en shiwenji , ed. Liu Xiuye (Beijing, 1958); and Liu Ts’un-yan, “Wu Ch’êng-ên: His Life and Career,” TP 53, reprinted in Liu Ts’un-yan, Selected Papers from the Hall of Harmonious Wind (Leiden, 1976), pp. 259–355.
72. See Tianqi Huai’an Fuzhi , j 19, 3b.
73. Miao Yonghe, Mingdai, pp. 23–25.
74. Excerpts of these texts are readily available in XYJYJZL, p. 9; XYJZLHB, pp. 180–81.
75. See Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel, attr. Luo Guanzhong; trans. Moss Roberts (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 937–38, 946–47.
76. Quoted in Hu Shi (1923), p. 378. Reprints of the entire relevant passage, including some poems by Wu Cheng’en, are readily available in WCESWJ, pp. 196–99; XYJYJZL, pp. 8–9; XYJZLHB, pp. 168–71.
77. See Zhang Peiheng , “Baihuiben Xiyouji shifou Wu Cheng’en suozuo ?” Shehui kexue zhanxian 4 (1983): 295–305.
78. Tanaka Iwao , “Saiyuki no sakusha ,” Shibun , n.s. 8 (1953): 37.
79. See ibid., 33–34, for some samples of Li’s annotations.
80. Liu Ts’un-yan, “Life and Career,” pp. 17–20.
81. See C.K. Hsiao, “An Iconoclast of the Sixteenth Century,” Tien Hsia Monthly 6 (1938): 317–41; Guo Shaoyu , Zhongguo wenxue pipingshi (2 vols., Shanghai, 1947), 2: 242–46; Wu Ze , Rujiao pantu Li Zhuowu (Shanghai, 1949), pp. 59–228; Rong Zhaozu , Li Zhuowu pingzhuan (Shanghai, 1936), pp. 69–106; Jean-François Billeter, Li Zhi, philosophe maudit (1527–1602): contribution à une sociologie du mandarinat chinois de la fin des Ming (Genève, 1979); Chen Qinghui , Li Zhuowu shengping ji qi sixiang yanjiu (Taipei, 1993); Xu Sumin , Li Zhi de zhen yu qi (Nanjing, 1998); Xu Jianping , Li Zhuowu zhuan (Beijing, 2004); Xu Jianping, Li Zhi sixiang yanbianshi (Beijing, 2005); Fu Xiaofan , Li Zhi zhexue sixiang yanjiu (Fuzhou, Fujian, 2007); and Fu Qiutao , Li Zhuowu zhuan (Changsha, Hunan, 2007).
82. Hu Shi’s translation in the Preface to Monkey, p. 1, text slightly emended; for the Chinese text, see WCESWJ, p. 62.
83. Edward L. Schafer, “Yu-yang tsa-tsu ,” in IC, pp. 940–41.
84. This group of persons, enigmatically named (the word gong is translated as “sire” in Robert Campany’s book listed in the abbreviations section), has motivated polemical exchanges among contemporary XYJ critics. Li An’gang , “Zailun Wu Cheng’en bushi Xiyouji de zuozhe ,” Tangdu xuekan , 4 (2001): 81–82, has argued from a reference to the TPGJ’s entry on the Prince Liu An to assert that these were eight immortals or transcendents coming to visit Liu. The prince, grandson of the founder of the Han dynasty, Liu Bang, was appointed King of Huainan in 164 BCE and died in 122 BCE. He was credited with a number of esoteric writings, the most well-known of which was the Inner Book that eventually became the Huainanzi , preserved in DZ 1176. For the book’s formation and textual history, see Harold D. Roth, The Textual History of the ‘Huai-nan Tzu’ (Ann Arbor, 1992). Cai Tieying , in “Xiyouji”de dansheng (Beijing, 2007), pp. 238–39, on the other hand, has countered with citations from the Shiji and other post-Han sources to maintain that the Eight Squires were merely courtiers of King Huainan’s assumed “secular” court. Neither critic bothered to check other available sources, for the early Daoist alchemist Ge Hong (283–343) had already mentioned these persons as “eight transcendent squires .” See the Baopuzi, Inner 11: 9b, where it is written: “Previously eight transcendent squires each had ingested one item [this chapter of the book is about ingesting organic and inorganic matter to attain longevity] so as to attain the condition of land transcendent. Several hundred years thereafter, each of them united with the divine elixir’s golden liquid and thereby ascended to the realm of the Grand Purity , , .” In his other famous treatise, Shenxianzhuan, Ge had more to say about the Eight Squires and their visitation of Prince Liu. For the Chinese text of the story, see “Huainan Wang ” in the Liexianzhuan Shenxianzhuan , trans. and anno. Teng Xiuzhan et al. (Tianjin, 1996), pp. 285–88. For the reconstructed text in English, see the translation and discussion in Campany, pp. 234–38.
85. The Chinese clause is characteristically ambiguous, because it can mean “an older edition” (so construed by some Chinese scholars because the phrase jiu you xu could have been an abbreviated form of jiuben you xu) or “previously, there was a preface [which is now absent from the present printing].” The official title of the 1592 edition, however, displays prominently the description of it being “newly printed or engraved, xinke.” Whether this conventional tag simply represents a habitual mode of rhetoric used for advertising, for issuing “the assurance that the reader had not seen this particular edition previously,” according to the perceptive generalization of Robert Hegel’s Reading Illustrated Fiction, p. 304, on books published in the Wanli era, is worth pondering. But that possibility is only one among other options, which may include, in fact, the following: that there was an older edition of XYJ, whether in printed or manuscript form; that it was printed at Shidetang also or by another publishing house called Rongshoutang (the name of which was written onto the margins of several juan-segment divisions of the 1592 edition); and that this notation indicates that the two publishing houses shared printing blocks for the production of one or another edition of the 1592 text. See the detailed and authoritative discussion in Cao Bingjian , “Xiyouji Shidetang ben yanjiu erti ,” Dongnan Daxue Xuebao , 11/2 (March 2009): 112–16.
86. 1592, 1: 2–5. As a foundational term in Buddhism, zang relates to the religion’s perennial grappling with the philosophical paradox of how fundamental nature or reality can be both real and unreal, substantial and insubstantial, distinct and nondistinct in its attributes by being used to translate the Sanskrit term, Garbhadhātu . According to Soothill, p. 312a–b, it is “the womb treasury, the universal source from which all things are produced; the matrix; the embryo; likened to a womb in which all of a child is conceived—its body, mind, etc. It is container and content; it covers and nourishes, and is the source of all supply. It represents the fundamental nature, both material elements and pure bodhi, or wisdom in essence or purity.” As Andrew Rawlinson has observed, however, becau
se garbha . . . is translated by ts’ang [sic, zang], “a certain vacuum was created in the Chinese vocabulary which the terms fo-hsing [foxing ] and fo-hsin [foxin] (=buddha-citta) neatly filled.” See “the Ambiguity of the Buddha-nature Concept in India and China,” in Early Ch’an in China and Tibet, eds. Whalen Lai and Lewis R. Lancaster (Berkeley, 1983), p. 260. The tangled web of meaning woven by multiple Sanskrit terms representing the nature of Buddha in Mahāyāna Buddhism extends outward when some of the Chinese terms used in translation are exploited by other traditions like Neo-Confucianism and Quanzhen Daoism. As we shall see, the terms xin and xing are crucial for reading a novel like XYJ.
87. Xiyou zhengdao shu , fasc. reprint of 1662 edition in Guben xiaoshuo jicheng , 437–440 (4 vols., Shanghai, 1990), 1: 2–6.
88. See “Quanzhen jiao he xiaoshuo Xiyouji ,” in HFTWJ, 3: 1331–33. The importance of Feng for the full-length novel is to be found in the fact that two of his compositions, a lyric to the tune of “Su Wu in Slow Pace or Suwu man ” and a ritual text named “Script for Ascending the Hall or Shengtang wen ” are both structured into the novel—the lyric for chapter 8 and the prose text for chapter 12. The lyric is preserved in Minghe yuyin, DZ, 744, j 2, 2; the ritual text in j 9, 13–14.
89. For the Chinese text of this Xiyouji, see Qiu Chuji ji , ed. Zhao Weidong (Jinan, 2005), pp. 201–39; DZ 34: 480–501. For an English translation, see Arthur Waley, Travels of an Alchemist (London, 1931). More recent studies include Igor de Rachewiltz and Terence Russel, “Ch’iu Ch’u-chi (1148–1227),” Papers on Far Eastern History 29 (1984): 1–27; Tao-chung Yao, “Ch’iu Ch’u-chi and Chinggis Khan,” HJAS 46 (1986): 201–19; Florian C. Reiter, “Ch’iu Chu-chi, ein Alchemist im China des frühen 13. Jahurhunderts. Neue Gesichtspunkte für eine historische Bewertung,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 139 (1989): 184–207; and Vincent Goossaert, “Qiu Chuji,” in ET 2: 808–11, with additional bibliography.
90. Plaks, p. 197, note 33. The poetic lines cited come from Qiuzu quanshu jieji , p. 256, collected in the Daozang jinghua , 5/2 (Taipei, 1960).
91. See Chen Zhibin , “Xiyouji de zuozhe shi Wu Cheng’en mo ?” in Xiyouji shiyi , annotated by Chen Dunfu (Taipei, 1976). This edition of the novel is an official publication printed by the Quanzhen Publishing House in Taiwan. Chen Dunfu is a well-known leader of Taiwan’s Quanzhen Order.
92. I cite only some representative pieces from academic journals since the publication of Plaks’s book in 1987. See Li Angang , “Xingming guizh shi Xiyouji de wenhua yuanxing ,” Shanxi Daxue Xuebao , 4 (1996): 27–35 (Li has published many other essays on the novel and a completely new edition thereof, boldly identifying the author as Anonymous and annotating the fiction meticulously with the conceptualities and terms of the noncanonical Daoist text mentioned in this essay’s title—see Li in the list of abbreviations); Huang Lin , “Guanyu Xiyouji de zuozhe he zhuyao jingshen ,” Fudan Xuebao , 2 (1998): 78–83; Liao Xiangdong , “Shi dafu wenhua jingshen de zhigui—Xiyouji ‘sanjiao heyi’ xinlun —,” Zhejiang Shifan Daxue Xuebao , 27/2 (2002): 31–36; Hu Yicheng , “Xiyouji shouyao zuozhe shi Yuan-Ming liangdai Quanzhen jiaotu ,” Yuncheng Gaodeng Zhuanke Xuexiao Xuebao , 20/2 (April 2002): 5–14; Cao Bingjian , “Huimou Xiyouji zuozhe yanjiu ji wojian ,” Liaoning Shifan Daxue Xuebao , 25/5 (September 2002): 82–86; Guo Jian , “Xiyouji yu ‘jindan dadao’ ’,” Huazhong Keji Daxue Xuebao , 6 (2002): 81–83; Chen Hong, Chen Hong ,, “Lun Xiyouji yu Quanzhenjiao zhi yuan ,” Wenxue yichan , 6 (2003); Huang Yi , Xu Jianping “Bainian Xiyouji zuozhe yanjiu de huigu yu fanxing ,” Yunnan Shehui Kexue , 2 (2004): 114–20; Wang Qizhou , “Lun Mingren dui Xiyouji de renshi ,” Shehui Kexue Yanjiu , 1 (2004): 135–39; and Hu Xiaowei , “Cong Zhiyuan bianwei lu dao Xiyouji ,” Henan Daxue Xuebao , 44/1 (January 2004): 68–73.
93. Liu, “Quanzhenjiao,” in HFTWJ 3: 1376, 1381–82. Liu’s long essay (pp. 1319–91) is indispensable reading on the subject for any serious student.
94. Plaks’s point is made on p. 199, but again, the serious student should read all of the chapter in Plaks, pp. 183–276.
95. Ren Bantang , Tangxinong (2 vols., Beijing, 1958), 2: 876–88.
96. Maurice Winternitz, A History of Indian Literature, trans. S. Ktkar and H. Kohn (2 vols., Calcutta, 1933), 2: 91.
97. Winternitz, ibid., p. 115, cites the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka sūtra to point out that “Buddhha teaches by means of sūtras, gāthās, legends, and jātakas.”
98. See the “Miaofalianhua jing jiangwen ,” and the “Weimojie jing jiangwen ,” in Dunhuang bianwenji , ed. Wang Zhongmin et al. (2 vols., Beijing, 1957), 2: 501–645. Older critical studies of the genre relative to Chinese literature have been conveniently collected in Dunhuang bianwen lunwen lu , eds. Zhou Shaoliang and Bai Huawen (2 vols., Shanghai, 1982). For more recent Western scholarship, see Victor Mair, T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Cambridge, MA, 1989); and also “The Contribution of T’ang and Five Dynasties Transformation Texts (pien-wen) to Later Chinese Popular Literature,” Sino-Platonic Papers 12 (1989), pp. 1–71.
99. Hu Shi, Baihua wenxue shi (Shanghai, 1928; reprint Taipei, 1957), pp. 204–10.
100. See James I. Crump, “The Conventions and Craft of Yuan Drama,” JAOS 91 (1971): 14–24; “The Elements of Yuan Opera,” JAS 17 (1958): 425–26; Cyril Birch, “Some Formal Characteristics of the hua-pen Story,” BSOAS 17 (1955): 348, 357; Jaroslav Průšek, “The Creative Methods of Chinese Medieval Story-Tellers,” in Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht, Holland, 1970), pp. 367–68; Patrick Hanan, “The Early Chinese Short Story: A Critical Theory in Outline,” HJAS 27 (1969): 174; Hanan, “Sources of the Chin P’ing Mei,” Asia Major, n.s. 10 (1963): 28; Hanan, “The Yün-men Chuan: From Chantefable to Short Story,” BSOAS 36 (1973): 302–03; and Hu Shiying, Huaben xiaoshuo gailun, 1, pp. 27–37, and especially chapters 3 and 4.
101. See The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, trans. David Tod Roy (Princeton, 1993), 1: xlv.
102. Apart from full or partial quotations from known sources that we shall discuss in part IV of this introduction and record in the chapters’ annotations, there are thirty-two poems in XYJ which may also be found, with minor variations, in the Fengshen yanyi (Investiture of the Gods), a work whose date and authorship are by no means firmly established, though it is generally regarded as approximately of the same period as the 1592 XYJ. The following table will make clear the location of these poems in the two narratives.
Liu Ts’un-yan in Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Novels, vol. I: The Authorship of the “Fêng Shên Yen I” (Wiesbade, 1962), pp. 204–42, and Wei Juxian in “Fengshenbang” gushi tanyuan (private edition; Hong Kong, 1960), II: 207–09, have both claimed that the Fengshen novel might have been the source for XYJ. On the basis of variations in diction, syntax, meter, rhyme, and the probable changes induced by different contexts, Nicholas Koss has reached an opposite conclusion: it is the author of the Fengshen who has deliberately borrowed from XYJ. See “The Relationship of Hsi-yu Chi and Feng-shen Yen-I: An Analysis of Poems Found in Both Novels,” TP, LXV/4–5 (1979): 143–65.
103. Classic Chinese Novel, p. 120.
104. For example, C.H. Wang, “Towards Defining a Chinese Heroism,” JAOS 95 (1975): 26.
105. See also Arai ken , “Saiyūki no naka no Saiyūki ,” Tōhō Gappō 36 (1964): 591–96, for some suggestive comments on this point.
106. Průšek, pp. 386 and 393.
107. Eric Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago, 1961), p. 95.
108. In folk wisdom of the Chinese, open wounds and sores, when exposed to sunlight, would dry up and thus heal more quickly. But a dried scab, a sign of near complete recovery, would render the sunlight superfluous, and the line thus suggests that the entire effort by the villagers and the priest to get rid of the monster is useless.
109. C.M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952), p. 31.
110. Sibu gudian xiaoshuo pinglun (Beijing, 1973), p. 31.
111. Lu Xun , “Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue ,” in Lu Xun quanji (16 vols., Beijing, 1981), 9: 154–78.
112. See the commentary at the end of the first chapter of the Xiyou zhenquan.
113. Xinshuo Xiyouji , annot. Zhang Shushen . Facs. reprint of Qiyoutang edition (1749) in Guben xiaoshuo jicheng, vols. 111–116 (6 vols., Shanghai, 1990), 1: 1.
114. Hu Shi (1923), pp. 383, 390.
115. Monkey, p. 5.
116. Hu Shi (1923), p. 390: “. , . , . , . .”
117. Lu Xun, “Xiaoshuo shilue” in Quanji, 9: 166: “, , , , .”
118. Tanaka Kenji and Arai Ken , “Saiyūki no Bungaku ,” in Chūgoku no Hachi-Dai Shōsetsu (Tokyo, 1965), p. 193.
119. Hsia, Introduction, p. 138.
120. As noted before, the bibliography of Andrew Plaks’s book of 1987 has an unrivalled plenitude of coverage of titles in European and Asian languages. For a comprehensive checklist of twentieth-century Japanese scholarship (with some Chinese references) on the novel up to 1990, see Isobe Akira , “Saiyūki kenkyū sencho runbun mokuroku ,” in Toyama daigaku jinbun gakubu kiyō 16 (1990), pp. 53–87. Publications since 1987 pertinent to our discussion will be mentioned and cited accordingly.
121. Da Tang gu Sanzang Xuanzang Fashi xingzhuang , in SZZSHB, p. 289. The account of this episode in FSZ mentions the barbarian as one converted to Buddhism by Xuanzang and having received the five prohibitions from the Master himself, thus adding poignance to the later incident of threatened killing and warning of the pilgrim. See SZZSHB, pp. 9–10.
122. Shihua, p. 1 and p. 31. The English translation of the Tang Monk’s first statement in CATCL, p. 1182—“This humble monk has a mission”—completely misses the accurate force of the word chi , which in postimperial literary usage can only mean an order from the emperor or the imperial court. The translation of the pilgrim’s repeated declaration on p. 1199 has to follow the text’s added specificity by rendering it as “a command from the Emperor of T’ang.” Misreading of this important word can lead even a seasoned specialist like Isobe Akira to label part of the painting albums with the title, “The Imperial Decree for Acquiring Scriptures in the Western Heaven .” The title, in turn, has elicited a justifiable correction by Cao Bingjian and Huang Lin in “tankao,” 74: “the Tang Monk owed the acquisition of scriptures not to any imperial decree, for it should still be regarded as a personal act of going illegally abroad , .” The word chi, it should be noted, is also used extensively in Daoist rituals and should be translated in both its verbal and nominal sense as “authoritative(ly) command.” As virtually all scholars of Daoism recognize, the religion’s rituals largely emulate or appropriate those of the early imperial state.