Journey to the West: the Classic Chinese Novel Explained

What is Journey to the West?

Journey to the West is a Chinese novel of 100 chapters, first printed in 1592, about a Buddhist monk who walks from China to India to bring back holy scriptures. He is guarded by four supernatural disciples: a monkey, a pig, a river monster and a dragon who has been turned into his white horse. On the way they meet eighty-one ordeals, most of them demons who want to eat the monk, and at the end all five are rewarded in the Buddha's paradise.

It is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature, with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber. It mixes comedy, fantasy and religious allegory, and its gods are often as ridiculous as its demons.

The best-known character is the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, who has his own entry here. This page is about the book itself. For the wider world of myth it draws on, start at Chinese mythology.

Who wrote Journey to the West?

Nobody knows for certain who wrote Journey to the West. The oldest surviving edition, printed in Nanjing in 1592 by a publishing house called Shidetang, gives no author's name. Its preface says nobody knows who wrote it and repeats rumors that it came from the household of a prince.

The name usually printed on the cover today is Wu Cheng'en, a scholar and poet from Huai'an in eastern China who died around 1582. The case for him rests mainly on a local history of Huai'an from the seventeenth century, which lists a work called Xiyou Ji among his writings. In the 1920s the writers Hu Shi and Lu Xun championed this attribution and it became standard. Doubters point out that the local history does not say what kind of book Wu's Xiyou Ji was, and a later catalog filed a work of that name under travel and geography.

What is certain is that the novel did not come from nowhere. The story of the monk and his monkey had been growing for centuries:

• A short Song dynasty text, The Story of How Tripitaka of the Great Tang Fetched the Scriptures, already has a monkey disciple who protects the monk with magic.
• A long stage play from around the start of the Ming dynasty, usually credited to Yang Jingxian, already has the pig and the river monster among the disciples.
• A Korean language textbook from the fourteenth century summarizes an episode from an earlier prose version that is now lost.

The 1592 author, whoever he was, turned this material into 100 chapters of prose and verse.

The real journey of the monk Xuanzang

The novel stands on a true story. Xuanzang was a Buddhist monk of the Tang dynasty who worried that the Buddhist texts in China were incomplete and badly translated. Around 629, without the emperor's permission, he slipped out of the country and set off overland for India. He crossed the deserts of the Silk Road, studied for years at the monastery of Nalanda in northern India, and returned to the capital Chang'an in 645. According to his biography he brought back 657 Buddhist texts, carried by twenty horses, and spent the rest of his life translating them.

Xuanzang dictated Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, a description of the countries he passed through, and his disciples wrote his biography. It includes the scene that best explains why storytellers loved him. Lost in the desert beyond the last frontier watchtower, he dropped his water bag and spilled all his water. He turned back toward the east, rode a few miles, then stopped.

The biography says he then went four nights and five days without a drop of water, until his old horse turned off the path and led him to grass and a pool. The novel keeps the outline of this life and changes almost everything else. The real Xuanzang left in secret; the fictional one is sent off with honor by the emperor Taizong, who makes him his sworn brother and gives him the name Sanzang, Tripitaka, after the three baskets of Buddhist scripture. The real monk was tough; the fictional one is gentle, easily frightened and always in need of rescue.

The five pilgrims

The five pilgrims are the monk and the four disciples who protect and carry him. Each of the disciples is a former immortal or heavenly official being punished for a crime, and the journey is their chance to earn forgiveness.

• Tang Sanzang, also called Tang Seng or Tripitaka: the monk. In the novel he is the reborn form of Golden Cicada, a disciple of the Buddha who was sent down to the human world for not listening to the Buddha's teaching.
• Sun Wukong, the Monkey King: the first and strongest disciple, a stone-born monkey who once made havoc in heaven. His full story is in our Sun Wukong entry.
• Zhu Bajie, often called Pigsy: once Marshal Tianpeng, commander of heaven's river forces, banished for getting drunk and grabbing at the moon goddess Chang'e. He was reborn with the face of a pig. He is greedy, lazy, lustful and very funny, and he fights with a nine-toothed iron rake.
• Sha Wujing, often called Sandy or Friar Sand: once the Curtain-Lifting General of heaven, banished for breaking a crystal cup at the peach banquet and turned into a man-eating monster of the Flowing Sands River. He is quiet, loyal and carries the luggage.
• The White Dragon Horse: the son of the Dragon King of the Western Sea, sentenced to death for setting fire to the pearls in his father's palace. Guanyin spares him so that he can carry the monk, and he takes the form of a white horse. See our entry on the Chinese dragon.

Guanyin names the pig Zhu Wuneng, "awakened to ability", and the river monster Sha Wujing, "awakened to purity", to match Sun Wukong, "awakened to emptiness". The monk adds the nickname Bajie, "eight prohibitions", because the pig has given up certain foods.

How the novel is built

The 100 chapters fall into four clear parts.

• Chapters 1 to 7: the Monkey King's own story, from his birth in a stone to havoc in heaven and his imprisonment under the Mountain of the Five Elements.
• Chapters 8 to 12: why the journey happens. The Buddha decides to send scriptures east, Guanyin goes looking for a pilgrim, and a chain of events at the Tang court ends with the emperor sending Xuanzang west.
• Chapters 13 to 97: the journey itself, a long series of adventures as the monk gathers his disciples and they fight their way through demons, kingdoms and mountains.
• Chapters 98 to 100: arrival at the Buddha's mountain, the scriptures, the last ordeal and the rewards.

The book opens long before the monkey, with a poem about the creation of the world. It names Pangu, the giant who in Chinese myth split heaven from earth.

In Chapter 8 the Buddha explains why the scriptures must go to China. He describes the four continents of the world and says that the southern one, where China lies, is full of greed and killing. He has three collections of scripture that could teach its people to be good.

Most editions printed today also have a Chapter 9 about the monk's birth: his father is murdered, and the baby is set adrift on a river and raised in a monastery. The 1592 edition has no such chapter; later editors added it.

The eighty-one ordeals and the famous episodes

The eighty-one ordeals are the official count of the dangers the monk must suffer before he can return. The number is nine times nine, a perfect number. In Chapter 99 the guardian spirits hand Guanyin a written list of everything that has happened. It begins before the monk was even born, with Golden Cicada's banishment, his near death at birth and his abandonment on the river. Guanyin reads it and finds that the total is one short.

So the last ordeal is staged on purpose. Crossing the Heaven-Reaching River on the back of an old turtle, the pilgrims are tipped into the water because the monk forgot to ask the Buddha, as the turtle had begged him, how long it would live.

Between the start and the finish, a handful of episodes have become famous on their own:

• The ginseng fruit, Chapters 24 to 26: at a Daoist temple the disciples steal and eat fruit shaped like newborn babies, and Sun Wukong knocks down the tree that grows them.
• The White Bone Demon, Chapter 27: a demon takes three disguises to get close to the monk, Sun Wukong kills each one, and the monk, who cannot see through the disguises, sends him away for murder.
• The Golden and Silver Horned Kings, Chapters 32 to 35: two demons with a gourd that sucks in anyone who answers to their name.
• Red Boy, Chapters 40 to 42: a child demon who breathes fire that water cannot put out, and the son of the Bull Demon King.
• The Kingdom of Women, Chapters 53 and 54: the monk and Pigsy drink from a river that makes them pregnant, and the queen of a country of women wants to marry the monk.
• The fake Monkey King, Chapters 57 and 58: a double so perfect that not even the gods of heaven can tell the two monkeys apart, until the Buddha does.
• The Flaming Mountain, Chapters 59 to 61: Sun Wukong borrows, loses and wins back the palm-leaf fan of Princess Iron Fan to put out a mountain of fire.

Gods, Buddhas and demons in Journey to the West

The Buddha, called Tathagata in the novel, is the highest power and the one who traps the Monkey King. The bodhisattva Guanyin is the pilgrims' real patron: she picks the monk, recruits every disciple and rescues them again and again. The Jade Emperor rules a heaven that runs like a nervous government office. Laozi, the Daoist sage, runs heaven's alchemy laboratory. The god Erlang, the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King Li Jing and his son Nezha lead heaven's armies. For a guide to the rest of the court, see the gods of Chinese mythology.

Most demons in the novel want one thing: the monk's flesh. The White Bone Demon explains why when she first sees him sitting by the road.

A running joke of the book is how many of these demons turn out to belong to someone in heaven. The two Horned Kings are the boys who tend Laozi's furnace. Their old mother in the mountains is a nine-tailed fox. A demon who builds a false copy of the Buddha's temple is the servant of the future Buddha Maitreya. The lion, the elephant and the giant bird of Lion-Camel Ridge are linked to two bodhisattvas and the Buddha himself. Near India, a princess turns out to be the Jade Rabbit escaped from the moon, and the moon goddess comes down with the women of the moon palace to take her home. Again and again Sun Wukong defeats a monster only to have its divine owner arrive and lead it away.

Wordless scriptures and the rewards at the end

When the pilgrims finally reach the Buddha's mountain, the scriptures nearly slip away from them. The two disciples in charge of the library ask for a gift. The monk has nothing to give, so they hand over scrolls that turn out to be completely blank. The pilgrims go back to complain, and the Buddha laughs.

The monk pays with his purple-gold begging bowl and receives 5,048 scrolls with words. In Chapter 100 the pilgrims fly back to Chang'an to deliver them, and the emperor tells them it is now the twenty-seventh year of his reign; the journey has taken fourteen years. Then they return to the Buddha, who gives each a title:

• Tang Sanzang becomes the Buddha of Sandalwood Merit.
• Sun Wukong becomes the Victorious Fighting Buddha.
• Zhu Bajie becomes the Altar Cleanser, a post that lets him eat the offerings on every altar. He protests that the others became Buddhas, and the Buddha replies that his mouth is strong and his stomach large.
• Sha Wujing becomes a Golden-Bodied Arhat.
• The White Dragon Horse becomes a heavenly dragon of the eight classes of protectors.

What Journey to the West means

Journey to the West can be read as an adventure story, a satire and a spiritual allegory at the same time. The chapter titles keep pointing to the allegory. Sun Wukong is often called the mind monkey and the dragon horse the horse of the will, after a Buddhist saying about the restless mind jumping like a monkey and galloping like a horse. Other titles borrow names from Daoist inner alchemy: Sun Wukong is the metal lord, Zhu Bajie the wood mother and Sha Wujing the yellow dame. Read this way, the five pilgrims are parts of one person.

The satire is easier to see. Heaven hands out titles with no duties, gods lose their pets, and even the Buddha's own staff ask the pilgrims for a tip.

Editions, translations and adaptations

Journey to the West reached English readers mainly through Monkey, the abridged translation by Arthur Waley published in 1942. Waley kept about a third of the chapters and cut nearly all the poetry. The first complete English translation of the whole novel was by the scholar Anthony C. Yu, published in four volumes between 1977 and 1983 and revised in 2012. A book titled simply Monkey or Monkey King is usually an abridgment.

In Chinese the title is Xiyou Ji. Readers in Japan know the story as Saiyuki and in Korea as Seoyugi. It has been adapted for opera, film and television countless times, including the animated film Havoc in Heaven, the 1986 Chinese television series Journey to the West and the 1995 film comedy A Chinese Odyssey.

The novel also borrows from older myth. The Queen Mother of the West, whose peach banquet the monkey wrecks, comes from the mountain of Kunlun. Our Shan Hai Jing bestiary collects the beasts of that older world, and our free game Beasts of Shanhai puts them into play.