Wu Cheng-En: Journey to the West

I am entirely inadequate to the task of doing this epic justice at this moment.  Think of it as a Ming dynasty Lord of the Rings crossbred with The Fairie Queen, and you will have some idea of the narrative and allegorical treasures held within.  Each passage holds the promise of a mystical secret that a lifetime of study would be insufficient to explicate, almost as layered and inscrutable as the I Ching, but with a veneer of plot that begs to be read, rather than consulted.

As impossible as the task of explicating these 1400 pages properly is, I have at my disposal a lovely tool provided in undergraduate days by the venerable C.K. Pellow: a truly great work of literature will contain in individual passages a microcosm of the whole.  Each individual segment will carry the attributes of the whole, just as a molecule is a reproduction of a galaxy.  Accordingly, in the event that one cannot address an entire work, one has the option of addressing a small passage that contains the entirety of the work within itself.  To wit:

 意馬心猿都失散，金公木母盡凋零。

黃婆傷損通分別，道義消疏怎得成！

 The Thought−horse and the Mind−ape had scattered,

The Lord of Metal and the Mother of Wood were dispersed.

The Yellow Wife was damaged, her powers divided,

The Way was finished, and how could it be saved?

All five characters in the book are contained herein, though it requires some explication to identify them.  The thought-horse and the mind-ape are the most easily identified, and even this half of a line is bursting with insight.  One common Western conception of identity is that of a dichotomy and opposition between the mind and the heart, thoughts and feelings.  Wu Cheng-En (heavily influenced by Buddhist, Confucianist, and Taoist thought) reveals the problem with such a dichotomy by giving voice to the fact that the thoughts and the mind are not necessarily one unit.  The thoughts, like the dragon prince in Journey to the West, are clear, discrete, sequential, and can be led to an extent.  They are tools, a service animal that helps us to carry our burdens and complete our tasks.

The mind, however, is neither so easy to define, nor so generally helpful.   It is not our thoughts that cause us suffering, it is our mind--specifically the monkey mind that seizes a thought, twists it into a narrative, and uses it as an excuse to run around making irreparable damage in our lives.  In some ways the entire book is the story of the maddeningly headstrong and willful Sun Wukong learning to channel his marvelous abilities in the service of some greater good.  It would be difficult to argue with a similar interpretation of my life in particular and, I suspect, any human's life.  

All of which is a fairly straightforward and defensible interpretation.  But in the second half of the line, it gets considerably fuzzier.  The structure seems to imply that the two entities mentioned in the second half are parallel to the two entities in the first half, but such a parallel is unsustainable.  Elsewhere Zhu Bajie and Sun Wukong are conflated with the elements wood and metal respectively, so a reading that identifies them in this phrase is all but mandatory.  The characters in the story are not not only parallel to parts of the identity, but also to the five natural elements of Chinese medicine and philosophy.  Zhu Bajie, introduced into the equation here, corresponds to the body on one side and to wood on the other:  driven by biological imperatives to eat, drink, and procreate, just as a tree is occupied with the natural physical process of absorbing, becoming, and expressing.  And just as it is in the mind-ape's nature to destroy and ruin all it touches when left to itself, so too does the body-pig make a mess of things when led entirely by its own desires.  

If only the parallel continued so simply!  In the next line, Sha Wujing is added to the recipe as "The Yellow Wife", and takes his place in the alchemical parallel as Earth.  But what is his corresponding role in the self?  If the Dragon Prince, Monkey King, and Pig General are thought, mind, and body respectively, what role does the sand monk play?  That of spirit? Of heart?  Neither of these interpretations is supported explicitly by the text, nor is there any convenient traditional parallel between the five elements and the parts of the self with which to fill in the blanks.  Rather, a picture begins to develop of the relative importance of the three elements Metal, Wood, and Fire in Chinese alchemy, and the corresponding unimportance of Fire and Water.  While all five are believed to be in a pentalectic of birth and suppression, the former three have a unique relationship.  Each of them correspond to two trigrams, colors, planets, etc. while Fire and Water are only assigned one each, allowing the cross-cultural sum of seven to be reached.  

The story of the Journey to the West, therefore, is not simply the story of how one overcomes the wildness of the mind and the desires of the body, but the story of how these two work in concert with a third thing, a catalyst, to achieve balance.  Left to their own, either Sun Wukong or Zhu Bajie cause nothing but chaos.  But with the addition of Earth--Sha Wujing--the pilgrims are completely unstoppable.  This triune division is as ubiquitous in Chinese thought as it is textually in Journey to the West, and is known by far more names than I could explicate or even identify:  the three treasures, the three jewels, the Three Pure Ones, and--perhaps most relevant here--the three bases: energy, vitality, and spirit.  To a Western mind, this division is inscrutable, and it remains largely so to me, but I will hold it in my active concepts folder.  What or who is Friar Sand?  He is the necessary third thing, which has no name in English, and no place in our mind/body dichotomy.  He is the center, the intermediate, the root and the base.  Without his perspective, we are lost.

And it is in the fourth quarter of the passage that we come to realize what the entire book is about.  In contrast to the other four characters, Tang Sanzang corresponds with neither an element or an aspect of the self.  It would be tempting, based on both this fact and the narrative as a whole, to interpret that as meaning he is the whole self:  the pilgrim going on a journey, in the course of which he strives to ovrecome his inner demons as much as any external ones he meets.  But the book is not "The Golden Cicada", and he is not "the self" in this passage.  The story is not of the pilgrim, but of the journey, and Tang Sanzang is "The Way" personified.  He is the result when the three elements work together: earth, wood, and metal; energy, vitality, and spirit; Lao Tze, Kong Tze, and Siddhartha; the plantain fan, the seven-star sword, and the dazzling rope.  At his final goal, he watches his body drown and float away, utterly without remorse or attachment, as though Dorothy wakes up and realizes that the journey took place entirely within herself.

All of which, wordy and seemingly thorough as it was, is only to say that I have opened a single crack through which to begin to understand two lines out of 1400 pages.