Monkey: The Journey to the West

4 stars. What a classic! I'm on a mission to read the four great classics of China and this is the first one I've attempted, for good reason.

Monkey, or rather Journey to the West, is a story that I've grown up with with children's stories and TV adaptations. It's a huge part of Chinese culture and there are even numerous temples dedicated to the Monkey God around the region. Reading this book made me do a bit more research on this - apparently worship to a Monkey God has been happening way, way before Wu Cheng'en wrote Journey to the West in the 14th century, so this might be his way of collating folktales around an existing mythology instead of inventing one of his own.

Monkey, or Sun Wukong as he's more commonly known, is a headstrong, arrogant, prideful entity supposed to be a representation of the hubris of humankind. He sure shows it! He wreaks havoc in the Heavenly Realm, he can never back down from a challenge or any perceived insult to himself, even jeopardizing his own goals sometimes when he's trying to be covert or trying to disguise himself but can't resist yelling out when he hears someone making fun of him behind his back. But because of that, Monkey achieves great heights and very early on titles himself the Great Sage Equal to Heaven (Qi Tian Da Sheng), a title that is still conferred to him in his actual temples around the world. He becomes so powerful that most heavenly officials are unable to defeat him and it takes the actual Buddha to make an appearance in order to subdue him.

While a lot of us know this already from the adaptations, I think a small but important detail this book taught me about Monkey's origin story is that his quest for power and recognition initially stemmed from a very primal fear of aging and dying. He pushes himself to learn immortality just to circumvent that eventuality, and the whole series of events ending in him creating chaos in Heaven started off when Yama, the King of Death, calls him to Hell because it was supposed to be the end of his lifespan. Ultimately, throughout it all, Monkey does achieve enlightenment and immortality but only because he embraced the Faith of Buddhism, which I guess is the whole treatise of this book. The whole story of Monkey is a very neat analogy for human nature, and the moral of this book is to show how mankind can achieve immortality (through Buddhism).

What was also a little surprising to me was just how much violence there was in this book! I guess the adaptations probably sanitized a bit (or a lot), but there was so much kidnapping, sexual assault, brutal deaths, and eating of humans. It was also all so casually referred to, like everything was no big deal. It reminded me of Grimm's fairy tales, where such violent deaths were also very casually and lightly depicted and in a very “bedtime story” sort of writing. The only thing I remember from the adaptations is how the demons and spirits they encountered wanted to eat Tripitaka's flesh because his sanctity would be like an elixir to them and boost their years of cultivation in order to achieve deity-hood at a much faster pace, but it was always only referred to. In the book, the sanctity of Tripitaka's flesh is only briefly mentioned once (at least in this abridged version), but everyone else is free game (and free meals).

As an aside, I listened to Kenneth Williams's performance of the audiobook which is probably extremely old (Williams passed away in 1988 so I'm assuming it had to be recorded in the early 80s or earlier). He gave the characters so much life, but the wild mispronunciations of Chinese names and terms in the book was also really grating. For example, he pronounces Taoist as “Tee-ao-ist” instead of just “Tow-ist”, and T'ang as “Tee-ang” (as in ‘anger') instead of “Tung” (like ‘tongue').

Overall, enjoyed this thoroughly. It was easy to read and entertaining. It also provides some insights into philosophy and life in the 14th century when it was written.