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.
China stories are told at wenhousecrafts.com
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