Journey to the West

The subtractive test is the book’s hardest, and much of the middle fails it. The frame is required: the havoc in Heaven makes the monkey who must be bound; the fillet and its spell, given by Guanyin in chapter 14, make the pilgrimage a discipline; Vulture Peak judges the whole road. The number is required too: chapter 99 audits the tally of eighty-one and adds a tribulation to make it whole. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is which tribulations. The episodes run on a formula: a demon wants the monk’s flesh for immortality, captures him, Monkey fights and fails, seeks help in Heaven or from Guanyin, and the demon proves the escaped mount or pet of a deity and is led home. The great episodes each turn a relation among the pilgrims; perhaps a third of the run is permitted by the form, and could be removed or reordered without loss.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The self is a company of unruly parts, quick mind, appetite, plodding will, a credulous and frightened conscience, which reach anything only together and by being bound; the chapter titles call Monkey “心猿”
(the mind-monkey), and the allegory is plain in the text. Power without discipline is havoc: the Great Sage Equal to Heaven is beaten by the Buddha because he cannot leave the hand he is in. Heaven is a court of titles, ranks and patronage, and the demons on the road are its servants and pets off the leash, a disclosure about power and protection that holds for any bureaucracy. What holds it below the bar is that the truth is announced by the allegory more than found in the persons, and repeats across the middle rather than deepening.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Height is real and often comic, and the register is wonder more than terror. The ceiling is in the opening chapters: the stone egg split on the mountain and the monkey bowing to the four quarters with light from his eyes reaching Heaven; the leap through the waterfall to the cave behind it; the Eight Trigrams furnace, from which he comes out with eyes of fire; and above all the wager with the Buddha, the somersault to five pillars at the end of the world, the name written on one, and the pillars found to be fingers. At the close the bottomless boat, where Tripitaka sees his own body float away downstream, is a height of a still kind. Flaming Mountain and the true and false Monkey King rise again. What holds it here is frequency: much of the middle is brisk adventure, and the set descriptions are often ornament rather than elevation.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The myth is built, not evoked, and here the book is at its height. Sun Wukong (孫悟空, “awakened to emptiness”) is the trickster at the scale of the cosmos: born of stone without parents, he takes a name, steals the peaches and the elixir, defies Heaven and is held; then he is bound by a fillet to a master he could kill with a finger, and serves. That arc of rebellion, subjection, service and enlightenment is load-bearing: the hundred chapters are its working out, and the investiture of chapter 100 completes it. Around him the quest is a figure of the self’s cultivation, and each companion holds an archetype in a particular body: Zhu Bajie the appetite, lazy, lustful and endearing, forever wanting to go home; Sha Wujing the patient carrier; the horse a dragon tamed. What holds it from the top is that the archetypes stand still while the pattern repeats, and only Monkey and Bajie grow.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The departure is large, and the stake was real. The book inherits a pious cycle: the pilgrimage of the Tang monk told for edification, a monkey servant already beside him in an earlier telling, and plays and prose versions behind it. It turns that inheritance into a comic, satirical and allegorical novel on a scale no prior version approached. Monkey is moved to the centre and given seven chapters of his own before the monk appears; Heaven becomes a farce of office, where he is made “弼馬溫”
(keeper of the horses) and finds the post the lowest; the three teachings are mocked and reconciled, Daoist imposters exposed at the Cart Slow Kingdom and Buddhist officials at Vulture Peak asking a gift before they hand over the scriptures. Irreverence toward Heaven, the Buddha’s court and the throne was a stake, and the book went out without a name. It is held at the bar, not above, because the chapter form, the storyteller’s frame and the verse are inherited intact.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the book loses part of what it knows. The episodic chain is the form of cultivation: the road does not progress by a plot but by trials, each the same and each a little different, and the repetition is the knowledge that the self is not tamed once. The number eighty-one, the audit in chapter 99 and the last tribulation added on the road home make the arithmetic of the path part of the meaning. The storyteller’s frame, each chapter breaking off with a summons to the next, carries the road forward, and the verse set in at landscapes and battles holds the reader at a pause that marks each stage. What holds it here is that the form also permits: much of the content could be told in another order or another number of episodes, and a shorter book in the same frame would know nearly the same things. The form is an instrument, not quite the knowledge.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence, not promise. The Qing commentators read the book as an allegory of internal alchemy, and the text gives them ground. Others have read it as a Buddhist allegory of the mind, or as Confucian, or, with Hu Shi in the 1920s, as a comic book of play and nothing more. Modern scholarship has kept the argument open between these readings, and none has closed it; four centuries of return have not settled what the road means. The comedy keeps yielding on return as well. What holds it below the deepest wells is that the yield is weighted to the first seven chapters and the last three, and the middle episodes give less on return than the frame.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Intrinsic force is high: the book made a kind. Lu Xun named the novel of gods and demons (神魔小說) after it, and it is the founding work; it showed that the vernacular chapter novel could carry allegory, satire and comic fantasy at once, beside the histories and the bandit saga. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sequels and answers of the Ming and Qing, among them Dong Yue’s Xiyou bu (1640), a dream of Monkey, and the gods-and-demons novels that followed; the opera stage, where Monkey plays have run without a break; Wan Laiming’s animated Havoc in Heaven (1961 to 1964), the television series of 1986, Japanese manga and television from Tezuka to Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) and the game Black Myth: Wukong (2024). What holds it below 9.0: the reach is wider than it is deep within literature, and the main line of the Chinese novel ran through the Jin Ping Mei and the Dream of the Red Chamber, not through it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Centuries, with the widest presence. The hundred chapters have been in print since 1592 and read without a break for more than four hundred years, in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, and in translation across the world since Arthur Waley’s abridged Monkey of 1942; its figures are present to children, the stage, the screen and games as well as to scholars, though fame of that kind is credited by a tenth at most. Form survives whole: the hundred chapters stand. Two small charges fall on the text. The 1592 edition was largely displaced in the Qing by commented and abridged editions, and recovered its standing only in the twentieth century; and the chapter on Tripitaka’s parents is held to be a Qing addition, so that the hundred chapters as read are not quite the hundred as first printed. A survival of four centuries stands below the millennia, and the figure sits in the middle of the band for centuries.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged on the Chinese. The vernacular prose is quick, colloquial and funny, and the dialogue is the book’s great making: Monkey’s insolence, Bajie’s whining and lying, Tripitaka’s helpless piety, each voice held across a hundred chapters, and the exchanges between Monkey and Bajie, the mocking and the tale-telling to the master, as alive as any comic dialogue of their age. The set pieces of battle and transformation, the seventy-two transformations and the hair plucked and blown into a hundred monkeys, are timed with skill. What holds it here: the verse and parallel prose are often formula, landscapes and armour described by stock, and the episodes reuse their machinery, the magic gourd, the summons to Guanyin, the reveal of the demon’s master, so often that the hand shows. The making is load-bearing in the voices and the opening chapters, workmanlike in much of the middle.

Score: 8.3 / 10

One physics governs much of the range, from slapstick to the sacred. The same law of rank and patronage runs through Heaven, the underworld, the courts of the kingdoms and the demons’ caves, and the same comedy reaches Vulture Peak, where the Buddha’s own disciples ask for a gift. Take the two farthest points, Monkey’s name written on a pillar at the end of the world and the bottomless boat taking Tripitaka’s body: one law holds them, that the self is smaller than it thinks and freer than it fears. What holds it here is the famous charge. The Monkey who routed Heaven’s armies is held for chapters by minor demons and must go for help; the law of force bends to the needs of the episode. The book half answers that the mind alone cannot reach the goal, and the answer is credited in part. The tone holds from first chapter to last; the physics of force does not.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Many orders are held, and the road integrates them. The natural order: mountains, rivers, deserts and flames, beasts that become demons. The sacred: Buddhist, Daoist and popular pantheons in one cosmology, with Heaven, the underworld and the Western Paradise mapped. The state: the Tang court and the emperor’s journey to the underworld, a dozen kingdoms with their kings, ministers and usurpers, a kingdom of women. The family: the Bull Demon King, Princess Iron Fan and the Red Boy, a household at war, and Tripitaka’s own origins. Consciousness: the allegory of the mind is the frame. Appetite and the body: Bajie’s hunger and lust, and the monk’s flesh as a feast. What holds it below the top: labour is thin, since the pilgrims beg and walk but the work of the world is little seen; history is myth more than history; and the kingdoms repeat one another.

Score: 8.9 / 10