The Journey to the West ed. by Anthony C. Yu (review)

(or rereading) of Topley’s lucid and brilliantly descriptive essays is recommended for anyone who has a serious interest in the practice of Chinese religion. JAMES L. WATSON Harvard University ANTHONY C. YU, trans. and ed., The Journey to the West. Revised edition. 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xx, 552 pp., ISBN 978-0-22697132 -2 (vol. 1); xvi, 410 pp., ISBN 978-0-226-97134-6 (vol. 2); xvi, 422 pp., ISBN 978-0-226-97137-7 (vol. 3); xvi, 428 pp., ISBN 978-0-226-97139-1 (vol. 4). US$27.00 per vol. (pb). Among the earliest long prose narrative texts in Chinese that are considered to be novels are a series having to do with gods and monsters that appeared late in the Ming period. Probably the first, and certainly the most challenging, is Xiyou ji 西遊 記, generally known in English as Journey to the West. Many of these novels seem to be less than serious despite the unquestioned religious status of their central characters, among them Guanyin 觀音 (the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokite svara), Mazu 媽祖 (Tianhou 天后 or Empress of Heaven, patron goddess of fishermen and seafarers), and the Daoist Eight Immortals 八仙; they are more often adventure tales than morality texts. By contrast, in addition to humor and adventure, generations of commentators have consistently found profound religious teachings in Journey to the West, and yet over the last century the novel has often been considered a ‘‘folk novel’’ and a humorous tale meant for the amusement of children. Only in recent decades have the novel’s ubiquitous references to Buddhist and Daoist concepts again been taken seriously, but few modern readers are sufficiently scholarly in the lore of both religions to plumb their significance. Anthony C. Yu 余國藩 is a rare exception. Yu published his first complete translation of the text between 1977 and 1983. At the time it was remarkable for its innumerable scholarly notes: they explained historical, religious, philosophical, and literary references, discussed matters of characterization and structure, and drew attention to stylistic matters. No Chinese text available then had anything like that degree of explanatory commentary, making his Journey to the West an essential aid for understanding Xiyou ji even if one could easily read the original. Professor Yu’s translation was a work of tremendous ability and enthusiasm, but in small ways it also appeared to be the product of haste, a rush to finish an enormous undertaking—for the translator but even more for the Press. The fourvolume set was widely recognized as a tremendous accomplishment, meriting a slightly revised printing that corrected some of the typographical errors that bedeviled the first. Now Professor Yu, recently retired from the University of Chicago, has spent years revising every page. Significantly, the old standard WadeGiles Romanization scheme has been converted to the far more widely read Hanyu pinyin in order to facilitate its use in the classroom. What was originally an erudite introduction has been further expanded to incorporate thirty years of active scholarship on the novel in Chinese, Japanese, English, French, and German. But the real contribution here is the incomparable effect of three decades of Professor Yu’s own reading and reflection on the text, its contexts, and its meanings. The result is 134 BOOK REVIEWS both an academic tour-de-force and a literary milestone: now readers of all levels of preparation can appreciate the complexity of the original in a style of English that is both complex and colloquial, engaging, and thus far more directly comparable to the rich and varied language of the original than was Yu’s earlier Journey to the West. Surely this revised edition is the crowning glory of a highly productive scholarly career, an event to be celebrated and a text worthy of very wide reading. Professor Yu’s Introduction takes up 96 pages of volume 1. It begins with a biographical sketch of the historical monk whose name is given to a protagonist here, Xuanzang 玄奘 (596?–664): in 627 he secretly left Tang 唐 on his own, an act of treason, to travel widely through Central Asia and far into the Indian subcontinent on a personal quest to learn whether Buddha nature was...