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2. King Mu (Mu Tianzi) andthe Journey to the West
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
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TWO King Mu (Mu Tianzi) and the Journey to the West In ancient China, to write was to establish images to exhaust meaning (lixiang jinyi). Directional terms such as “Dong” (East) and “Xi” (West) referred not merely to directions; they also conveyed the meaning of the world. Hence, the East (Dong), or the opposite of the West, has the same pronunciation as “motion” (dong). Dong’s written character also contains “wood” (mu). Thus, it resembles the image of the sun rising from the woods. The character for the West imitates the scene of a bird in its nest, for birds will return to their nests when they see the sunset. Hence, the character Xi was created not only to refer to the direction of West, but its pronunciation also resonates with the character qi, which means roosting. Xu Shen (1982 [100]), a Han Dynasty scholar who compiled the first Chinese dictionary in the year of A.D. 100, associated the East with the sunrise and the vitality of plants (p. 126) and the West with the sunset and with trees on which birds sojourn (p. 158), vividly illustrating the conflation of specific things and abstract directions. The pictograph Xi (West) had been in use since the age of the oracles (G. Wang, 2001 [1921], p. 174), during which, in their treatments of “state affairs,” the kings stood in the middle of the North China plain, looking out to the quarters beyond their realms, “observing, forecasting, and recording the numerous directional phenomena, mandane and spiritual” (Keightley, 2000, p. 121). However, the early Chinese inscriptions do not tell us much about the history of “travel” toward the direction of the West. The first docuTheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013 .indd 27 TheWestAsTheOther_FA02_17Dec2013.indd 27 19/12/13 10:41 AM 19/12/13 10:41 AM THE WEST AS THE OTHER 28 mented “journey to the West” came much later. This journey was completed by King Mu (in power roughly from 1001 B.C. to 952 B.C.), or “Zhou Muwang” (King Mu of Zhou), the fifth king of the Zhou Dynasty which replaced the Shang during the eleventh century B.C., “a hero, sung by poets, like his ancestor King Wen. He is also the protagonist of an adventure romance and one of the favorite personages of the story-tellers of ‘inspired wanderings’” (Granet, 1930, p. 20). Liezi, supposedly a collection of works by Lie Yukou (a Daoist thinker preceding Zhuangzi), has a fantastic legend of King Mu’s inspired wandering:1 In the time of King Mu of the Zhou Dynasty, there came from a country in the Far West a magician who could enter fire and water, and pierce metal and stone, who overturned mountains, turned back rivers, shifted walled cities, who rode the empty air without falling and passed unhindered through solid objects; there was no end to the thousands and myriads of ways in which he altered things and transformed them. He not only altered the shapes of things, he also changed the thoughts of men. King Mu reverenced him as though he were a god, served him as though he were his prince; he lodged him in the royal chambers, presented him with flesh of animals bred for sacrifice, picked singing girls to entertain him. But the magician found the rooms of the royal palace too mean and humble to live in, the delicacies of the royal kitchen too tough and rank to eat, the ladies of the royal harem too ugly and smelly for intimacy. Then King Mu built him a new mansion, devoting to it all the skill of his craftsmen in clay and wood and decorators in red ochre and whitewash; his treasuries were empty by the time the tower was finished. It was seven thousand feet high, overlooked the tops of the Chuang-nan [sic] [Zhongnan] Mountains, and was called “The Tower in the Middle Sky.” The King chose the loveliest and daintiest virgins of Cheng [Zheng] and Wei to fill it, put fragrant oils on their hair, straightened their moth eyebrows, adorned them with hairpins and earrings, dressed them in fine cotton and gauze bordered with the white silk of Ch’i [Qi], powdered their faces and blackened their eyebrows, hung their girdles with jade rings, sprinkled them with sweet herbs. He performed Receiving the Clouds, the Six Jewels, the Nine Succession Dances and the Morning Dew to please the magician, and every month offered him costly garments, every morning served him with costly foods. The...