Confucian Cultures of Authority

Aspects of Authority in Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West

Aspects of Authority in Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West Roberta E. Adams The Chinese folk novel, Journey to the West (Xiyou Ji), attributed to Wu Cheng’en (c.1500–c.1582), was popularized in English through Arthur Waley’s abridged translation, Monkey, first published in 1943.1 Waley presents the greater part of thirty chapters of the 100-chapter sixteenth-century novel, omitting most of the poetry as well as the couplets that introduce and often end each chapter. While Waley’s accessible version may remain the standard for undergraduate world literature classes, only by reading the full text (four volumes, 2,000+ pages) can we appreciate the complexity and depth of this classic, and the complex appeal of Monkey’s character. The novel is a tale of adventure with both worldly and other-worldly elements, full of humor, irony, and satire, but it also has serious underlying meaning. The journey is both temporal and spiritual; the pilgrims form an interrelated community and are yet individuals . While the religious pilgrimage is Buddhist, the novel is infused with Daoism and Confucianism, and a major theme is self-cultivation (xiu dao) and integration of the self. In examining the portrayals of authority and challenges to authority in the text, this paper will focus on the interrelationships of the pilgrims, particularly of the two primary characters, Xuanzang and Monkey, whose Master/disciple relationship is central to completion of both the temporal journey and the journey toward enlightenment. Authority is vested in personages (mortal and immortal), laws (worldly and heavenly), things (weapons, magic treasures ), and ideas and texts, particularly the Heart Sutra and the Buddhist scriptures. I will examine how various kinds of authority are displayed and challenged, and how, in the ultimate conclusion of the journey, authority is completely dissolved. Critical commentary on Journey to the West has swung from early scholars seeing it as profound allegory or as “a manual for Buddhist, Daoist, or Confucian self-cultivation,”2 to a reaction in the early 1900s 117 118 Roberta E. Adams when most critics regarded the text as mere satire or entertainment, to the Communist interpretations that saw Monkey as a rebel against bureaucracy and the monsters as “enemies of the people,”3 to the more recent return to studies of the religious and allegorical import of the text.4 Many commentators have seen the novel as incorporating the three major philosophies of China. In his eighteenth-century commentary, “The Original Intent of the Hsi-yu chi [Xiyou yuan-ji du fa],” Liu I-ming gives an essentially Taoist interpretation of the text, but maintains, “The Journey to the West is a book that is permeated through and through with the truth of the unity of the Three Teachings [Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism].5 Recent studies by Andrew Plaks site the novel within China’s sixteenth-century intellectual thought, “especially its central focus on what is commonly called the ‘philosophy of mind’ [xin xue].”6 Plaks, who sees a “Neo-Confucian dimension of meaning” in several sixteenth-century novels, examines certain terms and ideas as compatible among the three schools. “We can speak of the ‘convergence of the three teachings’ as something more integral than any particular movement of contrived syncretism.”7 Plaks’s analyses include a focus on underlying Buddhist and Daoist ideas in the novel, while “restor[ing] the centrality of bedrock Confucian concepts within the constellation of ideas at the heart of late Ming literati culture.”8 Francisca Cho Bantly counters with a wholly Buddhist interpretation.9 The underlying factual basis for Journey to the West is the sixteenyear journey (629–645 CE) of the Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang to India to bring the Buddhist Sutras back to China. In her study of his trip, Sally Hovey Wriggins notes that he returned with 150 pellets of the Buddha’s flesh, seven statues of the Buddha, and 657 books, to which he dedicated the rest of his life to translating into Chinese.10 On his return, the Emperor Taizong, who recognized the political importance of the journey, asked him to become his adviser on Asian relations. Declining that, Xuanzang did agree to write a book about the regions he passed through, Record of the Western Regions, completed in 646 CE.11 Wriggins notes that Xuanzang would have been gratified by his legacy of the promulgation of Buddhism in China, but probably surprised by the range of his influence—on archaeologists, art historians, and historians —and...