Monkey King: Journey to the West

By Wu Cheng'en, Julia Lovell (Editor) and Gene Luen Yang

*Now a Netflix animated movie featuring Stephanie Hsu, Bowen Yang, and BD Wong among the all-Asian voice cast*

Before there was The Lord of the Rings, there was China's Monkey King, one of the all-time great fantasy novels--which Neil Gaiman has said "is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people"--now published in a thrilling new one-volume translation with an illustrated foreword by the author of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel that is the basis for the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu, as well as Daniel Wu as the Monkey King

A shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, is one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature, known to legions of fans of the most popular anime of all time, Dragon Ball, and the world's largest e-sport, the video game League of Legends. High-spirited and omni-talented, he amasses dazzling weapons and skills on his journey to immortality: a gold-hooped staff that can grow as tall as the sky and shrink to the size of a needle; the ability to travel 108,000 miles in a single somersault. A master of subterfuge, he can transform himself into whomever or whatever he chooses and turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of clones. But his penchant for mischief repeatedly gets him into trouble, and when he raids Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches and gorges himself on the elixirs of the gods, the Buddha pins him beneath a mountain, freeing him only five hundred years later for a chance to redeem himself: He is to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on his fourteen-year journey to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras that will bring enlightenment to the Chinese empire.

Joined by two other fallen immortals--Pigsy, a rice-loving pig able to fly with its ears, and Sandy, a depressive man-eating river-sand monster--Monkey King undergoes eighty-one trials, doing battle with Red Boy, Princess Jade-Face, the Monstress Dowager, and all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards, and femmes fatales, navigating the perils of Fire-Cloud Cave, the River of Flowing Sand, the Water-Crystal Palace, and Casserole Mountain, and being serially captured, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and liquefied, but always hatching an ingenious plan to get himself and his fellow pilgrims out of their latest jam.

Monkey King: Journey to the West is at once a rollicking adventure, a comic satire of Chinese bureaucracy, and a spring of spiritual insight. With this new translation, the irrepressible rogue hero of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature has the potential to vault, with his signature cloud-somersault and unerring sense for fun, into the hearts of millions of Americans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781101600979

Wu Cheng'en

Wu Cheng'en (ca. 1500-1582) was een Chinese schrijver, dichter en ambtenaar uit de Ming-dynastie, geboren in Huai'an, provincie Jiangsu. Hij was bekend om zijn scherpe humor, humanistische blik en diepgaande kennis van het boeddhisme, taoïsme en confucianisme. Wu studeerde aan de Nanking Rijksacademie en diende later als ambtenaar, maar wijdde zich vooral aan literatuur en satire. Zijn naam leeft voort als auteur van Reis naar het Westen (Xiyouji), een van de vier klassieke romans van de Chinese literatuur, waarin volksverhalen, religieuze allegorie en levendige verbeeldingskracht samenkomen.

Book preview

Chapter One

After Pan Gu created the universe, by separating earth and sky with his mighty ax, the world was divided into four continents, in the north, south, east, and west. Our story takes place in the east.

By a great ocean lay a land called Aolai, within which was a mountain called Flower-Fruit, home to sundry immortals. What a mountain it was: of crimson ridges and strange boulders, phoenixes and unicorns, evergreen grasses and immortal peaches. And on its peak sat a divine stone, thirty-six and a half feet high, twenty-four in circumference.

Since creation, this rock had been nourished by heaven and earth, the sun and the moon, until it was divinely inspired with an immortal embryo, and one day gave birth to a stone egg, about as large as a ball. After exposure to the air, it turned into a stone monkey, with perfectly sculpted features and limbs. This monkey learned to climb and run, then bowed in all four directions of the compass. Two golden rays shone from his eyes all the way to the Palace of the Polestar, startling the benevolent sage of Heaven, the Jade Emperor, while he sat on his throne in the Hall of Divine Mists surrounded by his immortal ministers. The emperor ordered two of his generals, Thousand-Mile Eye and Follow-the-Wind Ear, to look out of the South Gate of Heaven and locate the source of this light. Your humble servants, they soon reported back, have traced it back to Flower-Fruit Mountain, in the small country of Aolai on the eastern continent, where a rock has given birth to an egg, which has turned into a stone monkey, whose golden eyes have dazzled even Your Majesty. But now the monkey has paused for some refreshment, and the blaze has dimmed.

The creatures of the mortal world are all born from heaven and earth, the Jade Emperor remarked tolerantly. Nothing they do can surprise us.

The monkey gamboled over the mountains, eating grass, drinking from streams, picking mountain flowers, hunting for fruit; he kept company with wolves and snakes, tigers and panthers, befriended deer and antelope, and swore brotherhood with macaques and apes. At night, he slept below cliffs; at sunrise, he wandered through mountains and caves, with no sense of the passing of time.

One sweltering morning, he sheltered from the heat with a crowd of monkeys in the shade of some pines; they swung from branch to branch, built sand pagodas, and chased dragonflies and lizards. Afterward, bathing in a mountain stream, they noticed how its current seemed to tumble like rolling melons and wondered where it was coming from. As we don’t have anything particular to do today, one of them suggested, let’s follow the stream to its origin. With shrieks of happy agreement, they all scrambled up the mountain to a great curtain of a waterfall.

The monkeys clapped their hands in delight. Whoever dares pass through the waterfall to discover the source of the water, and returns alive, can be our king.

After three calls for a volunteer, the stone monkey suddenly jumped out of the crowd. I’ll go! This excellent monkey closed his eyes, crouched, then sprang with one bound through the sheet of water. Once on the other side, he opened his eyes. Before him was a gleaming iron bridge, under which flowed the source of the stream. From the bridge, he could see into a beautiful cave residence: cushioned with moss, hung with stalactites, furnished with carved benches and beds, and equipped with pans and stoves. In the middle of the bridge hung a stone tablet on which was written, in large, regular calligraphy, the following address:

Heavenly Water-Curtain Cave

The Blessed Land of

Flower-Fruit Mountain

The stone monkey leaped back out through the waterfall. Fantastic luck! he whooped.

What’s it like inside? the other monkeys crowded around to ask. How deep is the water?

It’s the perfect place for us to make our home, an ideal refuge from Heaven’s fits of temper, explained the stone monkey, and described the wonders of Water-Curtain Cave. It could easily hold thousands of us. Let’s move in straightaway.

You go first and we’ll follow behind! yelped the others.

Once more, the stone monkey crouched, shut his eyes, and sprang through the water. Come on! he called. The braver of the monkeys immediately followed; the more nervous ones tweaked their ears, scratched their cheeks, stretched, and chattered a good deal before eventually leaping onto the bridge and into the cave. Once there, they were soon snatching at bowls, fighting over stoves and beds, and dragging things back and forth—for such is the mischief of monkeys. There was not a moment’s peace until they’d fretted themselves into exhaustion.

The stone monkey spoke again: "A monkey stands and falls by his word.* You promised that whoever dared pass through the waterfall and returned safely would be king. So what are you waiting for?"

Without a murmur of dissent, the monkeys immediately bowed and wished their new king a long, long life. Their new ruler quickly dropped his old name—Stone Monkey—in favor of Beautiful Monkey King and appointed a few of the monkeys to ministerial and civil service positions. The monkeys then devoted themselves to exploring the delights of Flower-Fruit Mountain by day and returning to Water-Curtain Cave at night.

The Beautiful Monkey King lived this happy, innocent life for somewhere between three and four hundred years. Then one day, while banqueting with the other monkeys, he suddenly became melancholy and began to weep. What has upset our great king? clamored the others.

I fear for the future, the monkey king explained with a sigh.

But we live in bliss, said his subjects, laughing, slaves of neither the unicorn, the phoenix, nor man. Why are you worrying about the future?

Life is good now, the monkey king said, but eventually we will grow old and fall into the clutches of Yama, King of the Underworld.

While the monkey masses—instantly fearful—buried their faces in their hands and mewled piteously, a long-armed ape jumped out of the crowd: Our great king’s new sense of mortality suggests the beginnings of a religious calling. Only three types of creature can escape King Yama and his wheel of life and death: Buddhas, immortals, and holy sages.

Where are they to be found? asked the monkey king.

In ancient caves on divine mountains.

I leave immediately, declared the monkey king. Even if my quest takes me to the very end of the world, I will return with the secret of eternal life.

All the monkeys applauded wildly. Marvelous! First, though, we will gather fruits from far away for a huge send-off feast. The next day was taken up with preparing and consuming this banquet, an extraordinary spread of plums, cherries, lychees, pears, dates, peaches, strawberries, almonds, walnuts, chestnuts, hazelnuts, tangerines, sugarcane, persimmons and pomegranates, and coconut and grape wine. The monkey king sat at the head of the tables, with his subjects approaching in turn, in strict order of age and rank, to toast him with wine, flowers, and fruit.

The following day, the monkey king rose early. Make me a dry pinewood raft, little monkeys, and fetch me a bamboo pole and some fruit for the journey. When all was ready, he hopped onto the raft and, pushing off with all his might, set off across the ocean. He was in luck, for a strong southeasterly wind blew him directly to the northwest coast of the southern continent. When his bamboo pole told him he was in shallow water, he abandoned the raft for the shoreline, where he encountered humans hunting for fish, wild geese, and clams and dredging salt.

He ran at them, making strange faces, and they dropped their baskets and nets and scattered in terror. The monkey king grabbed the slowest of them and stripped him of his clothes. After dressing in them, Monkey made a tour of the continent’s towns and cities, studying human manners and speech. Eight or nine years passed. Monkey remained determined to seek the formula for eternal life, while the humans who surrounded him sought only money and fame, without a thought for their own mortality; no one cared what became of

Reviews for Monkey King

[kakadoo202 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Main character is just too annoying for me to finish this.

[murphy4jacobs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Huge fun, especially for assigned reading for a college class. The translation is very accessible, there's plenty of humor, and the introduction gives a lot of very interesting information about this influential tale.

[lucky2loki · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For what I'd expect from a 500 year old novel, "Journey to the West" is impressively irreverent and inventive. A lot of this is probably thanks to Julia Lovell's translation, which does a remarkable job of bringing dialogue and characters to life in what could easily become a dreary parade of anonymous divinities and overwrought action sequences. It spends nearly a third of its pages on the origins of its protagonist Monkey, and a couple of chapters on the familial origins of the human monk who fills the role of the traditional (if amusingly whiny) hero, and then the rest on the titular journey -- itself a surprising structure. I would have foolishly assumed the story to be nearly the entire book, but not so.

The events themselves are very fairy tale-like, where a problem is presented and then (usually) quickly solved by Monkey's magical feats and trickery. When on occasion Monkey falls short, they simply have to complain to their Bodhisattva protector Guanyin, and she will unfailingly deux ex machina their way out of it. Thus, the book has very little in the way of actual stakes, and that I suspect remains its primary problem to most modern readers. But there is a lot of humour (primarily either cheeky Monkey dialogue or revelling in how bureaucratic the divine world is seen to be), some surprising turns on occasion, and even some characte development, so overall, it is a smaller issue than I would have assumed up front.

If you have an interest in this sort of thing -- by which I mean mythological novels from the 1500s -- you could do a lot worse than reading "Monkey King". Particularly, I imagine. in this particular translation.