Magic Monkey’s
Journey to the East
23 December 2006
In the world of the Chinese
literature, there are four books regarded as
the noble classics: The Dream of the Red
Chamber (红楼梦), Three Kingdoms (三国演义), Water Margin (水浒) and Journey
to the West (西游记).
The
mural of the Journey to the West (玄奘取经图)
created during 14th century, about two
hundred years beofre the creation of the
novel.
The mural was discovered in 2003 at
Jishan County (稷山县),
Shanxi Province (山西)
The Dream is about
teenage love affairs, but beneath this
superficial storyline, it is a truthful and
comprehensive mirror of the Chinese culture
and society. Its towering achievement in
novel writing, arguably, not only tops all
Chinese story-telling literature before it
– though many Chinese critics think that Golden
Plum (金瓶梅) is older and better
than Red Dream - but also shadows
those coming after, with Four Generations
Under One Roof (四世同堂), Camel Taxi Man
Xiangzi (骆驼祥子) by Laoshe (老舍), Family Trilogy (家春秋) by Bajin (巴金) and more recently A
Forsaken Capital City (废都) by Jia Pingao (贾平凹) closely following its
footsteps but still, in one way or other, not
quite getting there.
Kingdom and Margin, though
do not share the same literary high ground
with the Dream, have always enjoyed
greater popularity among China’s male
readers. The former is like illustrated
footnotes to Sun Tzu’s (孙子) Art of War (孙子兵法), and the latter the first
and the best martial arts story.
A popular proverb reflects the
diverse fan-bases of the above three
classics: Do not let a young man read Water
Margin (少不读水浒) (for he could
become more rebellious); do not let an old
man read Three Kingdoms (老不读三国) (for he might be more
scheming); do not let a girl read Dream
Chamber (女不读红楼) (for she may lose
herself in a romantic fantasy world).
As for the Journey,
seemingly it is suitable for a general
viewing with no ranking restrictions ever
being recommended. China has a rich heritage
in Daoist-fantasy lingerie literature, with
the most notable works including Ranks of
the Immortals (封神榜), In Search of
the Sacred (搜神记) and The Chat
Room (聊斋 a Chinese equivalent
of X-Files). The Journey
perfectly follows this line, just it is a
Buddhist fantasy, and its central character,
the Monkey King Sun Wukong (孙悟空), isn’t a Chinese native,
but an immigrant from India. So for him, the
pilgrim journey was less an adventure to the
west but more a road to home.
An Indian
god with many hands
Last Sunday, December 17, the
Monkey King returned to the East for a
ten-month business trip. When he emerged out
of box, it came as a big shock to the hosts
in Beijing’s Capital Museum for the uncanny
resemblance to his earthly embodiment in
China.
It is revealed that he made
his first appearance in the Indian mythology,
in which he was a superman and supermonkey
all in one. Since he travelled to China, this
monkey faced human bodied hero grew into a
Chinese kung fu master specialised in combat
stick play, and an enthusiastic promoter of
"pseudo science", keeping showing
off his supernormal abilities whenever he had
a chance.
Some time ago, there were
debates about the Monkey’s POB (place of
birth), with suspected locations ranging from
Gansu, Jiangsu, Henan to Shandong. Maybe the
Monkey meditating in an Indian museum caught
a drift of the arguments and decided he didn’t
like it. So when the chief of the Beijing
museum went to India to collect the
exhibition items arranged beforehand, he made
himself visible to the guest. The Chinese
chief did not disappoint him, immediately
putting forward a request for the Monkey to
be included in the show.
The Magic
Monkey in Meditation
It could also be the Monkey’s
way to urge the Chinese nobilities, like
Confucian, Li Shizhen (李时珍 the author of Herbal
Medica 本草纲目) and Qu Yuan (屈原, an patriotic Chinese poet,
the cause of the Dragon Boat Festival 端午节), to show up in a certain
country on the planet and tell ‘em to
respect other people’s origin of POB.
Pre Fengshui
and Size | Next: Naked
Truth with School Uniforms
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