In Our Time - Journey to the West

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China’s Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially the addition of a monkey as companion who, in the novel, becomes supersimian. For most readers the monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by this irrepressible Monkey with his extraordinary powers, accompanied by the fallen but recovering deities, Pigsy and Sandy.The image above, from the caricature series Yoshitoshi ryakuga or Sketches by Yoshitoshi, is of Monkey creating an army by plucking out his fur and blowing it into the air, and each hair becomes a monkey-warrior.With Julia Lovell Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of LondonChiung-yun Evelyn Liu Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, TaiwanAndCraig Clunas Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Journey to the West is one of the great novels of China's Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, he draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk

from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of fantastical embellishments. And for most readers, that monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by his companion, the irrepressible monkey, with his extraordinary powers accompanied by the fallen, but recovering deities, Pigsie and Sandy. When we need to discuss Journey to the West are, Julia Lovell, Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck University of London, Chung Yun-Evlin-New, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy,

Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and Craig Clunis, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College University of Oxford. Craig, Craig Clunis, what's distinctive about this stage of the Ming era that brought forward so much literature? China in the 16th century is a booming economy, it's a booming culture. China makes things that the rest of the world wants, and the rest of the world has silver that China wants, and so in an exchange of these, there's a great upsurge of the economy. And part of that goes into culture, particularly into the publishing industry. So the 16th century in China is the era when many of the great novels, dramas, other cultural forms that we still know today, they come into being and they take the form that we

know them by. China's a very urbanized society at this time. it's the world's biggest state. It has a population about 150 million. It's the size of the whole of Europe. It's very diverse, but at the same time, it's held together by language and culture, particularly at the elite level.

And so Journey to the West, when it takes its present form in 1592, is coming into an extremely vibrant culture of publishing, of writing, of the circulation of texts, and that's part of what explains the way that it happens to come together then. Is it true that at that time, there were more books in China than in the rest of the world put together? I think a number of scholars have suggested this.

Woodblock printing, which of course had been around in China for at least a thousand years. It wasn't a new technology at this time. So it's not about a technological change in China the way it is in Europe with the coming of the printing press in the early modern period. The books, the way books are being produced is the same, but the way they're being edited, distributed, and the numbers of people reading them, yes, it seems a fairly safe bet that there are more books in China,

and they exist at all sorts of levels. There are very beautifully produced books. In fact, the 1592 edition of Journey to the West, it's on very nice paper, it's got very nice illustrations, but there are also very cheap, what you almost might call paperbacks, that would have been very affordable as well. What struck the first Europeans to come to China

was how cheap books could be. What do we know about the author, or what can we glean about him or her? Well, the name on the spine today is Wuchengan. Wuchongan was a real person. He was alive from about 1506 to 1582. I think it's important to say that nobody really figured him for the author of the book

until the early 20th century. The book is published in 1592, and it's anonymous. And nobody at the time claims to know who the author is. There's no name attached to it. In the early 20th century, a very prominent Chinese scholar of the new culture movement used a couple of bits of what I think are fairly circumstantial evidence

to identify this Wu Chang'an character as the author of the 100-chapter Journey to the West, published in 1592. Now, he's absolutely the kind of person who could have done it. He's an over-educated and underemployed, if you like. That is, he's somebody who has a very good education

who fails to make it into the ranks or into the upper ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. We know he's involved in publishing. We know he writes lots of stuff for money. And you think he did it? I'm pretty skeptical. I think we don't know who did it

is my own take. And I think... So what was he working on if he did it? I mean, Were the versions around? He kind of just... Or did you whistle it up out of the thinner? There was a huge amount of stuff. There were earlier versions.

There were plays. It may not have been one single person. I don't think we need to imagine that one person, if we think of this as being more like a film, which is put together by lots of different people, or has a roomful of writers working on the script, it doesn't seem to me essential that we have to identify one person.

But it's handy to have one name, to pin on it and Wu Chung-un's is the name that has become associated with it very much since the early 20th century. Thank you very much. Julie Lovell, the novel has 100 chapters. Can you give us, is a difficult one this, can you give us a quick overview of its shape? Broadly, the novel divides into three parts. The first, the prologue, introduces the main character,

a magic monkey king called Sun Wau Kong. He's learnt the secrets of immortality and has other superpowers like being able to travel 108,000 miles in a single leap and he can transform himself into pretty much anything he wants. He's also unbeatable at Kung Fu. But at the same time, he's mischievous and arrogant and soon gets into a huge war with the Jade Emperor, ruler of the Taoist heaven,

after guzzling all the immortal peaches, wine and elixir reserved for a special heaven. banquet. Eventually, the Buddha punishes Monkey by imprisoning him under a mountain for half a millennium. Monkey was in the first seven chapters of a hundred chapter book. What happened after the seven? Can you fill in about the rest of the 93 chapters? The second part of the novel then jumps forward 500 years. The Buddha chooses a Chinese monk from the 7th century tongue empire, a man called Tripitaka, to make a dangerous journey west to India to collect Buddhist scriptures to enlighten the Chinese.

Monkey at this point is released from his mountain so he can redeem his sins by protecting Tripitaka on his Odyssey. And here we meet the other main characters of the quest two. There's a pig demon, pigsy, a river demon, sandy and a young dragon. And all have been banished from heaven for various misdemeanors and have to redeem themselves on the pilgrimage. The third part, the longest part of the book, recounts the 81 challenges the pilgrims face on their journey to the west. There are dozens of monsters, rivers, mountains, and deserts. And most of these monsters or demons want to eat Tripitaka because his pious flesh

will confer immortality on them. But eventually, after 14 years, Monkey, Tripitaka and the others reach India, they deliver the sutras back to China, then become immortals in the Buddha's monastery. So, among many other things, the novel traces monkeys' journey, his moral arc from troublemaker to virtuous Buddhist. Thank you very much. Now, was there a real historical event underpinning this? I believe there was. What was it?

Yeah, so the novel sprang, as Craig says, from a much older set of stories and legends about a real historical character called Shwenzang or Tripitaka, who lived around 600 to 664 CE. And this was a remarkable man. He became a monk at the age of 12. He received a Buddhist education and learnt Sanskrit, but he was impatient with the gaps in the translations of Buddhist writings that had reached China. So in the late 620s, he decided to travel to India so that he could bring back to

China, the original Buddhist texts. So he broke an imperial prohibition against travel to the West. He set off across the deserts and mountains of the old Silk Roads. It was a very tough journey. There are many kingdoms, many natural obstacles to pass through. And it took him one way and another. His journey there and back was for about 17 years, with something around 17 years.

And that in some form or other was the basis of what became, and what became the book that we're going to talk about. That's right. So as you'd imagine, myths about Tripitaka began during his lifetime, and they were adapted by storytellers in increasingly outlandish way. So it's by about the 13th century, these adaptations had added a monkey disciple, the monkey character who helped Tripitaka.

And over the next 300 years or so, this character came to dominate the narrative of the story. journey. Thank you very much indeed. Chung Yong, what would the first readers associate with monkeys? They would find this character both familiar but also interestingly peculiar. Familiar in the sense that as both Craig and Julia mentioned earlier, that the story of Tripitika's scripture-seeking journey has been circulated for a long, long time before the novel came out. Already there is this guardian figure, the monkey

guardian figure coming together with Tripitika. So in that aspect, it's something familiar. However, in this novel, there are a few things that I think it's quite new. It starts with the birth of the monkey. In the early version, there is the guardian

appear, and then later on the story further developed. So that becomes Tripiton on his way, subjugated a monkey demon. And the monkey even then follow him to the journey. Basically, he's just a wild creature living in the mountains. So he usually symbolized the wild, the wilderness, the kind of wild, in contrast to the older, there's a demon and we subjugated it. However, in the journey to the west, he has a birth. And in fact, in the very

beginning, he was a kind of pure goodness. He was super smart. He has inner luminosity. Like, he's always the one with most insights. Why do you think the novel begins, though, with the story of the monkey? What is the writing getting at? For one thing, I think there's the reversal of the plot that people are familiar with. So usually people would usually say this is a fantastic book, even a strange, but wonderfully strange book. It also reverse the relationship between the master and the disciple, right? The disciple is actually more insightful than the master.

And I think the other reason is that the novel is playing was this long Buddhist idea of comparing a monkey to human heart, human mind. This is saying that, you know, human mind or the activities of human consciousness, it's just like monkey. It's unstable. It's elusive. It changes like all the time. So we have to be very wary of that change. Thank you. Craig, Clunis. He's far and away the dominant favorite and most standout characters in the book. Why is that? Well, the seven first certain chapters focus on him,

but it's important to say he is there right through the book. He is the main character of the whole hundred chapters. And I think it's partly because Tripitika is evil forces want to stop enlightenment. Evil forces want to stop this pilgrimage to collect the scriptures from the West. So there's all sorts of obstacles. There's always a demon or a monster or a plague or a plague of monsters coming at Tripitika. And the only thing that stands between him and being usually eaten, but certainly done away with in some unpleasant way, is his protectors.

And Monkey is his chief protector. So if it wasn't for Monkey, the pilgrimage would be over before it even started because Tripitica would have been boiled or fried or eaten by one of the... of these monsters that he's constantly meeting. And I think it's one of these, we all wish we were monkey, but we think we're Tripitika, or we suspect we're really Tripitika, because Tripitika is, he's, you know, for someone who was, in reality, a great Buddhist scholar, the way he's portrayed in the old, he's very feeble, he's hungry, he's tired, he doesn't fancy it, it doesn't seem fun anymore.

He would quite happily drop the whole thing. But Monkey is, as you yourself said in the introduction, he is irrepressible. Nothing stops him. There is no monster, no boiling mountain of flame that is going to stop him. So the thing that keeps the reader going, I think, through all of these episodes, is that how's he going to get out of this one kind of thing? There's always another, another. And every time you think, a bit like the old silent movie, every time you think,

he can't possibly survive this. Then, wham, with one bound our hero was free and he produces a spell or a move or a blow or a leap or something and wow, he's done it. And then we're on to the next one and the pattern repeats itself. And yet it's somehow, so it's repetitious.

You kind of know what's coming. It's like watching a serial and that may reflect its origins in oral storytelling. Thank you very much. Why, Julia, why do you think he's both fantastical but he's also realistic? Is that true? I think it is. I think on the one hand, monkey is of course an immortal magic monkey. He has these superpowers that, as Craig said, enable him to triumph over dozens of these

demons of all sorts of shapes, sizes and aptitude. So on the one hand, this distances him from the average mortal reader. But on the other hand, monkey also has many mortal human attributes. So there's his pursuit of fun and mischief and his impulsiveness. And this is particularly clear in the prologue where he's always cheeky and sassy. He's ready to taunt or backchat to Taoist gods or to dragon kings or the rulers of heaven and hell. at one particularly irreverent point he even urinates on the hand of the Buddha. And Monkey has the comic artlessness of an impulsive child.

So the crime that gets him into big trouble with heaven is eating all these peaches and wines and elixies, which he does just without a thought for the consequences of the future wrath of heaven, and then he just runs away at the end. And I think this element of picaresque mischief making remains a question. constant throughout the book. We see monkey joking and cheeking his way through dozens of tight corners on the pilgrimage to India. And he's also believable. He seems human because he's flawed. He's arrogant and impatient. So he doesn't begin and end the book as some kind of supernatural saint, but it's rather, as Chong Yun was saying, he is tamed or tempered. So he

slowly and often quite painfully learns to control his reckless instincts. Thank you. Juniuk, there's great fluidity between bullism, Taoism and Confucianism in this novel. Does it question them or does it reinforce them? I would say this novel is a very profound rumination on the three teachings and how they might work together or not. but it's thinking very critically about what we call truth. For example, I think all the main characters, all the pilgrims,

I think they all represent partial truth, one aspect of the truth, right? So for Tripitaka, he's a Buddhist monk known for his excessive piety, but if it's too much, you become blind by it. And the monkey, as Julia just mentioned, yes, Like when I was much younger and reading the novel, just like many other readers, monkeys, of course, my favorite. Because he's so smart and he always comes out like plans and his wit and all the powers he has. But really, you think about it. He also has his own flaws, right? His poem to violence and he's quick-tempered. And really, he has a very strong ego.

If we read the first seven chapters carefully, you notice that one thing that, one thing that, he care most. It's about being recognized. So yes, he has the power. He's kind of climbing up a social ladder from just a carefree monkey in the East Island. And then gradually he moved upward and become like one in the heaven. And still he wants to be someone like equal to sage equal to the heaven. So he's climbing up there. But you see there he also has a flaw. And for the other characters too. We also see them represent different flaws of human beings. Julia, can you give us example that show how the characters, main characters relate to each other? Well, a lot of the characterisation in the novel comes through situation and dialogue while the pilgrims are on the quest.

And so I'd really emphasise that in addition to all its other meanings that Craig and and Chung Yun been talking about. It's also a very funny, playful book. There's a lot of parody of different registers. And the main characters, the pilgrims, they're always chatting and joking and sniping at each other. So it's the fast-moving dialogue that entertains them and the reader on this long, long journey. And a really important triangle here is between Tripitaka monkey and Pixie. So as Craig said Tripitaka sometimes comes over as rather primly useless, so he lays into monkey when monkey uses force against an enemy, but then Tripitaka himself becomes a kind of jelly of fear in the face of any danger. He's entirely dependent on a monkey to get him out of danger.

Pigsie is fixated on personal gratification, so he's often fooled by demons, tempting him with a bowl of fried noodles. And he has this extraordinary capacity to power nap, even in the noisiest situations. But he's also competitive with Monkey, and that leads to some comic friction. So one example of this is when the Pilgrims meet a female demon, the white bone demon on a mountain. The demon wants to eat Tripitaka, and she approaches them in three different disguises as a beautiful woman with food and so on. And every time Monkey recognizes her. as a demon and tries to kill her. But each time Pigsie only has eyes for the bowl of food

and he narks at Monkey so he claims that monkeys murdering an innocent person. Tripitaka is convinced by Pigsie and banishes Monkey that very soon he has to bring him back when Tripitaka falls into the hands of another demon and Pigsie's too busy napping again to rescue Tripitaka. And I'd also love to mention here one particular episode in the Land of women. So this is a kind of topsy-turvy country. There are no men. And there's a magic river that brings on childbirth. And Pigsie and Tripitaka, they become pregnant by unwittingly

drinking from this river. And within hours, Pigsley and Tripitaka are moaning from the agonies of labour, while monkey and even the other pilgrim Sandy amuse themselves by speculating out loud that the baby will come out of Pigsie's armpit and so on and so forth. So there's the journey is full of this kind of comic back chat. Thank you. Craig, Craig, Clunas, can you tell us why he wants to make this massive trip first in the sixth century and then in the book at the end of the 16th century? What is he looking for? What's so valuable about his quest? Well, he's looking for texts and he's looking for texts in foreign languages,

as Julia explained back in the 7th century. Buddhism, of course, originates in India. It comes to China in the first centuries of the common era. And the texts have to be translated from a variety of Indian languages. And it's dissatisfaction with the existing translations that lead the original, the real historical Shuen Zang, to India. I mean, this might be going slightly out on a limb here, but one of the things that if we think about the context where this novel is being produced in the late 16th century,

it's also the period when Ming China is coming into contact with the Far West for the first time. So just about nine years before the novel is published in 1592, you get the setting up of the first Catholic mission in China. And it's interesting that Chinese intellectuals who knew these Catholic missionaries and who knew, them as men coming from the far west, they saw them as these sort of exotic creatures who were very much associated with Taoism and Buddhism. There was a bit of unclarity about Christianity

as a separate religion. But the idea of the far west as a place of spiritual enlightenment, of higher powers, of marvels, this goes right through Chinese history from the original period of the actual pilgrimage to the West right through to the 16th century and it's maybe getting a bit of a boost in the late 16th century from an awareness among intellectuals that the far west is a real place nobody's been there but the idea that the far west actually really does exist and look here are these occasional exotic characters coming from there

that's part of the it seems to me of the much wider context in which the novels being received in the late 16th century And I think the book absolutely tells us really fascinating things about Ming China's perceptions of the world beyond its borders. So on the one hand, the novel is about a journey out of China. It's about fascination with foreign places with a foreign religion, Buddhism. And as the pilgrims go west, they sometimes speak admiringly of the beauty of the non-Chinese cities that they encounter. But there's also a slightly odd thing going on with this journey because however far the travellers go,

the landscape doesn't seem to change that much or it repeats itself. And strangely, the pilgrims don't seem to struggle with learning or speaking foreign languages and the religious hierarchy. So the Chinese Taoist hierarchy, it still holds sway. And then right at the end, the pilgrims return to China to give the sutras back to the town.

emperor and they reflect on how great China was and how mediocre the lands of the West were by comparison. So I suppose it's worth considering whether the book projects cosmopolitanism or perhaps provincialism. You know, the idea that the rest of the world is going to be just like China or inferior. And then I suppose the next question would be that if it's the latter view, we could also ask whether that view is satirical. And just picking up on that on that point of Julius. Not only does everybody speak Chinese, all the way they go. The food is Chinese. So it is all, the de, it's always fried noodles that the demons are tempting pigsy with. And then, you know, the Rice, the Bureau of Rice Reincarnation, which I haven't got, you know, is a long sort of elaborate sort of gag about

toilets. It's a sort of scatological joke. But it, but it's rice, you know, so that the food is, the food is familiar, however far west you go. You know, they, as it were, they, they, they, they, they travel in a kind of China bubble and I think that's kind of interesting too. Are you suggesting that the sixth century man didn't really get there or go there? Oh no, no, no, he really got there, but he must have spoken

all of these languages and eaten all kinds, you know, eating all kinds of things. No, no, I think there's no, there's no historical, there's no doubt about the success of the real historical journey. Does the novel have anything about the concerns of the day

the time, the bird, in which it was written? Well, it's worth remembering that the 16th century is also a great period of Buddhist revival. Buddhism, it had been right, goes right, through Chinese history, but in the late 16th century, its prestige among intellectuals is higher than it's been for 200 years. The imperial court is a great patron of Buddhism, and so there's a kind of big Buddhist thing going on in the late Ming. but one of the things the novel also does is poke fun at people in power. So there are lots of encounters with bureaucracies,

both heavenly bureaucracies and terrestrial bureaucracies. And these bureaucrats are often lazy, venal, just simply incompetent. And it's very hard not to see that there are strong elements of satire there. That for Ming Reader as part of the fun was seeing powerful people, particularly powerful, a powerful bureaucracy, which after all is what governed Ming China, seeing that bureaucracy made to look ridiculous and seeing fun poked at it. That seems to me to be one of the concerns of Ming people that is also permeates, that permeates the novel. Juni, is there a consistent moral in the story?

Is there a moral? And if so, what is it? This is actually a very rich, and we can even say it's an open text. but if we want to talk about if there's a consistent moral of the story, I would say, yes, maybe never abide by only one set of teachings. As I mentioned earlier, the novel incorporated discourses of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism as a way of interrogating all these teachings. And so I think it's playfulness on the superficial, well, on their first level, it's creating a lot of fun. But on a deeper philosophical level, it's really a conversation among all these different teachings. But to further understand why is he posing this kind of message, not to abide by any particular set of teaching,

I think the philosophical school, the Wang Yang Ming school, not only that school, but in the Le Ming, when we talk about the street teachings, they have different like tenets. But I think they have one thing in common. They all agree that there is the innate goodness in every human beings that has a great potential for them to self-cultivate and to become a better person. And in Buddhism, you can become a Buddha. In Taoism, you can become immortal.

In Confucianism, you become a sage. Julia, when you were translating in the novel recently, what challenges did you face? What was hardest to do? How did you make you come alive for a contemporary? There were a couple of standout challenges I had to deal with. One was that the version that I did was not a full version. It was an abridgment.

So I cut it down to about a quarter of the full length. So obviously that required a lot of difficult decisions to be made about what I thought were the most important characters, themes, and stories. But on one level, the structure of the book helped me with the abridgment process. So I should say that after the main characters have been introduced by about chapter 12, the rest of the book is mainly episodic in structure. So as, as Craig said, it's a bit like a serial or a series. There are a series of challenges and demons. and for the most part, characters or situations or stories which are encountered, they come up once and they don't come up later.

So you can quite easily cut things out. So my job was to really decide what were the most arresting, entertaining, thought-provoking stories. Another real challenge was with the language. Obviously, this book was put together in the... 16th century in China. So this is a literary culture, which is geographically and chronologically a long way from the one that I am operating in. And in particular, there are aspects of the literary novel published in 1592, which sort of bear the traces of the cultural origins of the story, which are as sort of oral storytelling. So there's quite a lot of repetition sometimes within

individual chapters. You can almost imagine that it's a storyteller in a marketplace, recapitulating elements of the story so far in case his listeners have wandered off at some point. So the decision was, you know, whether to keep those traces of the oral storytelling routes within my translation or whether to abide more by the rules of my own contemporary literary culture. Briefly, Craig, can you encapsulate what made this novel stand out when compared with others from the same time, same era? Well, Julia has talked about its multi-voicedness, and I think it's the something for everybody. So this isn't the only late-ming novel that deals with supernatural or with demons, but they haven't lasted or they haven't lasted to the same degree as popular favorites. And I think one of the reasons that this stands out is its complexity and there's something for everybody.

So you can read it for the rude jokes and the fun. You can read it for the fights. You can read it for the parodies of different kinds of language. You can read it for the social satire. And then you can read it and the elite have read it as quite a kind of profound and moral work with the kind of spiritual depth that Chong Yun was just talking about. I think it's significant that the Ming imperial state, and indeed the Qing imperial state, which followed it,

didn't like novels. And there are lots of points at which novels are, there are attempts to ban novels, either on the grounds that they're politically subversive or that they are obscene. But as far as I can see, no one ever attempts to ban the journey to the West. That is, it isn't seen as a book that is bad for you in the way that a number of other novels have.

And so there's also that, that level. But I think it's the, it's the complexity and the fact that there's something for everybody. And Chung Yun just said, and this is, I think, very interesting and borne out by other people's experience, that you can read it. It's one of these kind of great works that you read it at different stages in your life and it says different things to you. different bits of it are meaningful if you read it more than once. Thank you very much. Chung-un, why do you think this appeals to modern readers or to modern viewers of the television series, made of it and so on?

I think this novel is already talking about some modern, modern, quote, and unquote human condition. For example, this is an imperfect world. Not only the pilgrims have flawed, even the gods are flawed. For that, I think it's something. quite new at that time for a novel to write about God in this way. So we remember that at the very end when they arrive at the spiritual mountain where the Buddha resides, supposedly traditionally, because there are other pilgrimage narrative in China.

So we know that at this point, this should be like a glorious moment, right, the final success. But not so much in the novel, there are the Buddhist attendants seeking bribes from the pilgrims. And when the Buddha knows about it, she actually says, well, you know, this is common. This is the way like the world is. So even the Buddha land is no exception. And so he gives them first wordless scriptures, which is supposed to best kind of wisdom. Because for the ultimate wisdom, ultimate truth, you cannot really express it using words. Craig, how has this novel been reinterpreted in other forms?

I mentioned television and opera. Can you just develop these a little bit? One of the ways it's not had an impact is in the Chinese visual arts. There are illustrations to the published versions of the Knoll, but it's not an artistic theme until this century. It's very pervasive, though, in the theatre, and I think it's important to think about theatre in China

in the late imperial period as the art form like opera in 19th century, that goes right across class. So this is an elite art form, but it's also massively popular. So that's one of the reasons that these stories have an impact. The stories of this monkey cycle have an impact because they are there in everybody's lives. Storytellers are telling them on the street.

They are being performed in the theatre right up to the imperial court. It's also got a kind of geographical reach. It's going beyond China. from quite a very early period. Indeed, one of the very earliest pieces of evidence that we have for these monkey stories is in an early 15th century book which is about teaching Koreans

how to speak Chinese. It's a teach-yourself Chinese book and it has dialogue in it that has part of the monkey story. So the novel is very popular in Korea, in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's being translated and adapted in Japan from the middle of the 18th century And then in the 20th century, this rebelliousness, of course, strikes a chord in a China which is convulsed by revolutions throughout the 20th century.

Monkey is the ultimate disrespecter of authority. And so one can see how he becomes really almost a kind of personal hero, Mazadong, the chairman of the Communist Party after 1949. He's a big fan. He's a keen reader, he's a big fan The story is promoted, it's one of the bits of pre-modern culture that the Communist Party after 1949 is rather keen on Although significantly, they're really only keen on

the very early part of the novel, the prologue, as it were, in which Monkey makes havoc in heaven. Monkey disrespects the Jade Emperor, the ruler of the universe. And so Monkey kind of comes to stand for the rebellious, irrepressible, not to be put down cheeky figure who is embodied by the figure of the revolutionary. And this obviously has colossal resonances in China during the decades of the cultural revolution. But then it's part of mass popular culture. The Japanese television series that was made of it in the late 1970s is a world.

It's certainly very popular in this country. It's big in Australia. It's dubbed into English. So, as well as being huge in Japan. So the thing has the capacity to go beyond the context in which it was created, which after all is one of the marks of a great work of literature. Julia, would you like to comment on that yourself and add to it? Yeah, I would say that the novel remains a really important. imaginative resource for audiences in East Asia and across the global synophone diaspora. You know, Craig talked about its adaptations in opera and in the 20th century it's been repurposed in comics, cartoons, recently even in video games. So to give you a sense of the versatility and the prevalence of these stories,

There are new TV or film adaptations in the Sinophone world every few years. Pop stars incorporate the stories into their lyrics. China's current leader, Xi Jinping, is clearly a fan too. So there's a story in the book where Monkey disguises himself as a fly, hides in the bubbles on top of an adversary's cup of tea. So he's swallowed by her, and then he thumps her insides until she submits to him. So in 2013, Xi Jinping used this story as an analogy for how the Chinese Communist Party needed to infiltrate the parts of the internet that were critical of the Chinese government.

But you also, as Craig also said, it's a story beloved of rebels and creative. So there was a very popular film adaptation in the 1990s out of Hong Kong, which was a big hit amongst mainland Chinese students because this was a time when young people were disillusioned with their government after the crackdown of 1989. And this film portrayed Monkey as a kind of aimless, rebellious drifter and that mood really captured the spirit of that moment. So the novel, its stories and characters are often like water. They fit around many different moments, moods and uses.

Thank you. Chong Yun finally, what do you think? What do you think has made the novel so adaptable to different generations and so influential? It's a story about every man, right? All the pilgrims with their first. flaws. And also, monkey wizard was bluffing. I think it speaks to everyone. We all can relate to those characters. They are not like high up there. They're just like one of us. And also I think

somewhat deeper, this novel is also about freedom and constraint. This is a constant theme, right? The monkey, he has this staff that can like become big and small, long and short. And so using this thing, he kind of break boundaries. There's all the transatlantic. But then there's the hat band on his hat. So all those powers, if it keeps growing, his ego keeps swelling, there's going to a problem. So it needs to be constrained. I think even in modern day, the extent of freedom that one has and to what extent does that need to be constrained is still an issue. So I think in one of the adaptations, the one made in Hong Kong that Julia just mentioned, it's actually a comic tragedy.

Here in the novel, yes, in the Journey to the West, we see this as a great comedy. But come to think of it, when the God cannot help you all the time when even gods are flawed and human are flawed too. This is a new human condition. I think that's a human condition that I think all modern people share.

Thank you very much indeed. Well, thank you. Thank you, Jung Yun, and thank you Craig Clunis. and Julia, Julia Lovell, and our studio engineer and Angel Dix. Next week, it's the Interregnum, the time of Oliver Cromwell, the 11 years between the execution of Charles I first and the restoration of Charles I second. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Didn't you feel you had time to say, which you can now say now? I think the novels like the language, different layers of meaning is at work here. Is this like a journey in different like geographical area? But I do in this aspect, I sort of agree with Anthony Yu that there is one aspect of a novel that is an internal journey. Although I don't quite agree that it's completely, it completely corresponds to the Dao's internal alchemy, that trajectory. but I think at least part of it is.

So in this theory, the Taoist internal alchemical practice, the human body inside is a geographical space. So you have like when you reach the head, well, you start with your lower abdomen. So there is like a field and you cultivate your field and then you kind of try to put together your chi and you imagine them to become like a circle.

and then they will move upward through your spine and to your neck, and then eventually to your head, and then, like, break out of your head. And so when there are actual pictures depicting the inside of body using the landscape, and then when it depicts the head, it's like mountains inside there. And when it depicts your abdominal, there's the field there. So in a sense, if we think of this, then when we read it. read a novel, all the mountains they cross, the river, that's kind of like the block vessels, the fluid and the body. I think it also makes sense. That's why it's so fun to read this novel.

You never get tired of it. The more you know about Chinese religion at that time, the more you see how the author is playing with all these illusions. One other thing I could have said relates to the existence of continuations and fans. fiction. It's a common thing in Ming novels, and this is partly to do with the commercial publishing world, that you get continuations.

So as early as 1640, somebody writes not a continuation of the novel, but they write a sort of an interpolation in it and publish a separate novel. And then late in the 17th century, there's the later journey to the West,

which is a kind of, you know, Journey to the West too. And there are more of these as well. And this is quite common in Chinese publishing. And these things haven't lasted again. These are things that only kind of scholars read nowadays. They haven't got the bite or the meaning of the original. And one of the things that suggests, I suppose,

is that there is something about the way that this is written. You know, the point that Julia kept making, quite rightly, about the richness of the language. there's something about the ways for it. It's not just the story. It's the texture of the thing. It's the formal aspects of it as a work of literature, which have ensured its lastingness.

And also this idea that, as Julia again said, that it's a kind of resource, you know, that you can do stuff with it. You don't just have to consume it passively. It allows for a very active, of readership, Zhong Yun just said, and you can make it in,

you can pick it up, pick bits of it and do stuff with that, that people have been doing this for hundreds of years and may continue to do so, who knows for hundreds more. Julia, can you think of comparisons with the West at about the same time? Would country retails be a useful connection and other books in the same, John, that we had in the West? I think in, I think in terms of the impact of the books,

characters and stories on the synophone cultural imagination, I think that we can definitely make useful comparisons with the Canterbury Tales or with Don Quixote from Spanish, literature. If you're thinking about English literature scenarios, again, I think sort of Shakespeare and Dickens in terms of, you know, people can talk about stories and characters and that can communicate a kind of whole universe of situation or experience. I think in terms of the kind of rambunctuous, rambling language, I think comparisons with Rabilet,

probably work also. And, you know, I think it's helpful to, you know, go back to highlighting the language, the specifics about the language in which the book is written. So, you know, like the other great books, great novels published in the 16th century in China, this Journey to the West is innovative in that it is written in an early modern vernacular, which admittedly is quite a long way from contemporary 21st century Chinese vernacular. But compared to the elusive, laconic, compressed literary Chinese, which up to that point had really dominated elite literary production, the early modern vernacular of Journey to the West and other Ming vernacular fiction,

is extremely mobile, fluid. You know, it can combine registers, a sort of very down-to-earth-earthy register can be combined with sort of quite pompous officialese. I mean, I think one other thing we didn't mention is that the book is not just prose. There are a lot of poems in the novel as well, which can perhaps be understood,

almost functioning like Arias do in opera. you know, they really embroider and develop upon a fight or a physical detail or an appearance. So, you know, you've got the prose and you've got the poetry as well, just this sort of very fluid mix of registers, which I think, again, sort of really speaks to this very vibrant milieu of 16th century China that Craig evoked so beautifully. Craig was talking about the sequels to Journey to the West. I think because of the dynamic in this novel, so just like both Julia and Craig mentioned,

the open-end quality of the novel. So I think there's an anxiety about the ending for later readers. If what they actually receive is the second-rate scriptures with word, which is not the ultimate truth, then what does it mean? So I remember in one of the sequels, the beginning of the novel is, So after the second rate scriptures was brought back to China, after like decades, the people in the Tang Dynasty become, they degenerate it again. They need another set of scriptures. So in a way, compared to older narrative about religious pilgrimage, like the ending is like an enclosure and the final ending that, you know, people find salvation.

Here it doesn't guarantee that. And that's why the dynamic of the narrative continues till the very end. And I think that also invites later adaptations or rewrite things or sequels to the novel. It's a bit like the ending of Line of Duty. You know, the way the novel, you know, there's a big debate, you know, going on in social media. You know, was the ending of Line of Duty disappointing or not? And as Julia said, the Journey to the West has this sort of strangely downbeat ending. There isn't a great flourish of trumpets and it's all wonderful and harassing.

It's kind of, well, is that it? But actually, I think for me, that's part of its quality, that it doesn't just go for the simple closure. It remains open. Thank you all very much. Thank you. I'm sure people will enjoy that a lot. Thank you all very much indeed.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. And for more from In Our Time on this era in Chinese history, you can look for the main voyages on BBC sounds. Sneakers? Trainers. Whatever you want to call them, they are amongst the most iconic cultural objects of our time. But their evolution is a story rarely told until now.

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