Monkey King's Amazing Adventures. Wu Cheng'en
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the “Eight Prohibitions,” a name given him by Guanyin to remind him of his Buddhist vows, so much in contrast with his natural inclinations. Richard translated the term as the Eight Commandments. Once an immortal who was a commander of 100,000 soldiers of the River of Heaven, he drank too much and attempted to flirt with Chang’e, the moon goddess (or “the fairies”, as Richard translates), resulting in his banishment into the mortal world. He was supposed to be reborn as a human, but ended up in the womb of a sow, and he was born half-man half-pig. In the original Chinese novel, he is often called daizi, meaning “idiot.” His weapon is the “nine-tooth iron rake.” He and the Monkey seem to be constantly engaged in a sort of game of one-upmanship, and this rivalry provides some of the funniest scenes in the novel.
(13) Sha the Monk, or Sha Wujing “Awakened to Purity.” He was exiled to the mortal world and made to look like a monster because he accidentally smashed a crystal goblet at a heavenly banquet. He lives in the River of Quicksand, where he terrorizes travelers trying to cross the river, and occasionally eats them. This is the reason he is often depicted with a necklace of skulls, as in the Japanese television series. He is also persuaded to join the pilgrimage. Like Monkey, who knows 72 transformations, and the Pig, who knows 36, he knows 18. His weapon is the Crescent Moon Shovel, and he is usually depicted with it. Compared with the others he is well behaved, obedient, and reliable, but a bit morose and prone to worrying. At the end of the journey he is made an arhat in Paradise, while the Pig is made Official Altar Cleanser, meaning he gets to eat the offerings on every Buddhist altar throughout the country. It is hard to imagine a more perfect image of Paradise for the Pig than that.
(14) The bodhisattvas were enlightened souls who chose to forego Extinction in order to remain in the world of mortals to use their understanding and wisdom to help other people along the road to enlightenment. The most famous were Avalokitesvara, the Indian prototype of the Chinese Guanyin, and Manjusri, in Chinese Wenshu. Samantabhadra, in Chinese Puxian Pusa, also plays a role in the novel. Pusa is the Chinese form of bodhisattva. The arhats, in Chinese luohan, are disciples of the Buddha who have already attained enlightenment. They have no role to play, but are often mentioned in the context of the inhabitants of the Buddhist Paradise. There are also a variety of messengers, which Richard calls angels, or occasionally seraphim and cherubim, who have minor roles. Other spirits have delightful names such as The Divine Kinsman and the Barefoot Taoist. Demons are sometimes fallen angels or spirits, or in the allegorical sense, the more evil aspects of human nature.
(4) RICHARD’S TRANSLATION
The first English translations of the Record of Western Regions and Huili’s Biography of Xuanzang were by Samuel Beal, Records of the Western World, London, 1906, and The Life of Hiuen-tsang, London 1911. Timothy Richard published his translation of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures in 1913. His title and subtitle shows his understanding of the book: “ A Journey to Heaven, being a Chinese Epic and Allegory dealing with the Origin of the Universe, The Evolution of Monkey to Man, The Evolution of Man to the Immortal, and Revealing the Religion, Science, and Magic, which moulded the Life of the Central Ages of Central Asia, and which underlie the Civilization of the Far East to this Day. By Ch’iu Chang-ch’un. A.D. 1208-1288 Born 67 years before Dante.”
One can scarcely believe this is the same book that Arthur Waley called Monkey, or the basis of the TV series Monkey Magic and the many other adaptations since. But it is, and it is important to understand why. Confucian China, like Victorian England, was a rather moralistic society. Confucian scholars considered novels frivolous, but like their Victorian counterparts, were not adverse to a bit of nonsense every now and then. Nevertheless, all literature, even the most frivolous, had to contain a moral message. This was the intellectual environment Richard was living in.
To Richard, the moral message of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures was clearly that of the pilgrim struggling against internal and external demons towards enlightenment. Richard was a Baptist missionary, born in 1845 and first assigned to Yantai, in Shandong. He became the editor of the Wanguo Gongbao, known in English as A Review of the Times, a reformist journal founded by the American Methodist missionary Young J. Allen. Its subject matter ranged from discussions on the politics of Western nation states to the virtues and advantages of Christianity. It attracted a wide and influential Chinese readership throughout its thirty-nine year run from 1868 to 1907. The Qing reformer Kang Youwei said of the publication: “I owe my conversion to reform chiefly on the writings of two missionaries, the Rev. Timothy Richard and the Rev. Dr. Young J. Allen.” Kang Youwei and his student Liang Qichao are generally regarded as the most important reformers in late Qing China. Richard was a prolific writer and translator, and one of the most influential missionaries of his day, often ranked with and compared to Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission.
Although a committed Christian missionary, Richard was fundamentally an internationalist, and fervently believed in the cause of modernization. He did not share the general view of the missionaries that Christianity was the only revealed Truth from God; rather, he argued, Christianity and the major Chinese religions, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, had much in common. Some of these communalities were superficial, like vestments and rituals; others were deeper, including the urge to seek spiritual enlightenment and the belief in a Higher Power, known by different names in different religions, but essentially the same. Richard did not insist that converts burn their tablets to their ancestors: one could be a good Christian and show respect to ones’ ancestors, with the appropriate rites, without any conflict. This showed an attitude similar to that of Matteo Ricci in the Ming, but differed from most of the missionaries of his day.
The Wanguo Gongbao was extremely influential amongst the Chinese educated classes, and Richard mixed with high officials easily. Clearly he knew Chinese very well, and was well versed in Chinese literature and history, which would have made him even more respected by the Chinese literati. Despite the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion, during which many thousands of Christians had been murdered, he believed that the Chinese educated classes were not fundamentally opposed to the West, or to scientific progress, or to Christianity itself. So he must have been delighted to discover The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures. Many of its themes resonated with his own intuitions: the Three Religions are One, and respect is due to all of them. To this Richard offered his own insight: moreover, many of the characteristics of the Chinese religions, Mahayana Buddhism in particular, are shared with Christianity. Richard thought he had discovered the connection in The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures. The other issue Richard was passionate about was that scientific thought was not foreign to the Chinese tradition; was that there was a tradition of scientific knowledge in China, and the evidence was in The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures.
Richard’s attitudes are reflected in both his translation and in his notes. He often translates the Jade Emperor as God, the Taoist Celestial Palace and the Buddhist Paradise as Heaven and Maitreya, the Buddha-to-Come, as the Messiah. Messengers are angels, Taoist immortals and Buddhist bodhisattvas are all saints, and the Buddhist/Taoist paradise is populated with such Old Testament figures as cherubim and seraphim. That the Jade Emperor in his Celestial Palace could see what was going on below proved to Richard that “the telescope was invented by Galileo only in 1609 AD, therefore the Chinese must have had some kind of telescope before we in Europe had it.” When the Monkey is showing off his knowledge of Buddhist metaphysics and getting it all garbled, he says “the fundamental laws are like the aiding forces of God passing between heaven and earth without interruption, traversing 18,000 li in one flash.” To which Richard added a note: “The speed of electricity anticipated.”
The last chapter of Richard’s translation even has the Buddha berating Xuanzang for not believing in the “true religion,” which Richard claims was Nestorianism, a variety of Christianity that flourished during the Tang. And among the many Buddhas and bodhisattvas in the final litany, Richard managed to insert a reference to Mahomet of the Great Sea, to the Messiah and to Brahma the Creator. The reference to the Messiah is Richard’s translation of Maitreya, the Buddha-to-Come; the reference to Brahma is his translation of the Narayana Buddha. How Richard got “Mohammed of the Great Sea” out of Chingjing dahai zhong pusa, “The Bodhisattvas of the Ocean of Purity” is a bit of a mystery. He may have misunderstood chingjing “pure and clean” as qingzhen “pure and true,” the Chinese term for Islam. People see things the way