Afterthoughts and Reflections

ROBERT E. HEGEL

Working on this translation has brought to a new stage my fifty-plus years of engagement with this short novel. I first read Further Adventures on the Journey to the West during the 1966–67 academic year, when my Columbia University graduate director, Professor C. T. Hsia (1921–2013), assigned it to me as a suitable topic for my MA thesis. Although I was reluctant to admit it at that time, many of its artistic and philosophical complexities were well beyond my grasp. C. T. and his elder brother T. A. Hsia (1916–1965) had recently coauthored an article about it and its parent novel, the widely acknowledged masterpiece Journey to the West, which was a help but still left many layers of meaning hidden from me.¹ Even so, I did write the thesis and earned the degree. Several years later, after completing intense reading courses in Buddhist texts and having finished the doctorate under C. T.’s direction, I landed my first major job and began to hear the ticking of the tenure clock. I turned to the novel again for its potential as part of my first monograph. By that time, more had been written about it, my reading was at a more sophisticated level, and my cultural knowledge had grown considerably. For that reason Further Adventures took on a central role as I formulated my monograph, The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. Over subsequent decades, I wrote about its illustrations, but I never stopped thinking about the text and how it might have been interpreted and by whom. Who were its intended readers? Now having reread it many times, I think finally I get the fun it was intended to convey, not as entertainment but as a literary game and a half-serious spoof on enlightenment literature available at that time, a parable of self-delusion from a Buddhist perspective.

The debate over its authorship has been a matter of no small interest for me ever since my first reading. It seemed hardly possible that Dong Tuo (his given name has been read as Yue) could had written this novel in his late teens—at a time in his life when most young men of his class were cramming for the civil service examinations. Some scholars hypothesized that he wrote it after the Qing conquest, although there is scant evidence for that in the fiction. And why was his father’s studio name given to identify the author in the late Ming edition? One early explanation was that the filial younger Dong had used Dong Sizhang’s studio name out of respect for his father, who had died more than a decade before the novel was printed. I had never seen another case of two men knowingly using the same studio name, and recently several Chinese scholars have published the same conclusion. As Qiancheng Li explains in the introduction here, the far more convincing argument is that Dong Sizhang was the primary author; his filial son had at most added one chapter, and most likely it was he who had arranged for its publication. Dong Tuo may have gone so far as to raise money to pay for a limited printing, given how few copies were ever known to be in circulation.²

Even though few verifiable facts about the novel’s production can be found, some are indisputable. First, members of the highly cultured Dong family were fans of, and deeply knowledgeable about, the parent novel, Journey to the West. Second, one or more members of the Dong family lavished considerable amounts of time in the creation of the dense narrative of Further Adventures—and they had a broad knowledge of both contemporary writings and Buddhist texts and doctrine. This further demonstrates that sophisticated works of “popular fiction” (tongsu xiaoshuo) were read seriously by members of the highly educated social groups—the authors of poetry, history, philosophical and religious texts, and highbrow miscellanies.

Given the novel’s consistent engagement with Buddhist thought, its author’s conception of the work is similarly clear: any reader who was not knowledgeable about Chinese history, poetry and drama, and philosophy would not be able to grasp the subtleties of its several layers of meaning. The novel surely was intended to engage well-educated readers, not young men who had only devoted themselves to preparation for the civil service examinations, much less beginning readers who merely sought entertainment. Would a twenty-year-old be writing for an audience of men several decades older, who had themselves produced many highly acclaimed writings still in circulation? It hardly seems likely.

Modern readers regularly assume that Journey to the West was popular only for its entertainment value. But even today various religious groups in southeastern China and Southeast Asia revere the novel as scripture containing guidance on supernatural protection against the demonic forces of this world: crime, illness, and social discord. The earlier novel was reprinted many times, usually with extensive commentary that sought to elucidate either its religious or its literary value—or both. Further Adventures must never have been seen as having commercial potential as entertainment fiction; if it had, it would have been more widely printed and circulated. Instead, it was apparently known only in limited circles and was reprinted only twice before the twentieth century.

Reasons for its limited circulation can be seen in what the novel demands of its readers. In chapters 5 to 7, Sun Wukong the Monkey King takes the physical form of Fair Lady Yu, the consort of General Xiang Yu, in the land of the Ancients. To avoid going to bed with “her husband,” the Pilgrim Monkey feigns discomfort, and Xiang Yu tells “her” stories of his own accomplishments that drag on for hours. Monkey is thoroughly bored by his tales, but this character’s narratives spin off from the standard historical account of the period, Sima Qian’s immortal Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), while in effect parodying this martial hero. The shape-shifting Pilgrim’s interactions with the other ancient beauties are creative and at least diverting, but then he arranges to have Xiang Yu kill his real wife and treats her death in the most offhand manner. Seemingly, this callousness would set the reader back a bit, forcing a response somewhat like that of the Tang Monk in Journey to the West: he is appalled by Pilgrim’s violence and frequently punishes him for it. In effect, then, we readers are alternatively amused by the Monkey King, censorious of his heartlessness, and then—with him—bored by a story that any reader familiar with the Records of the Grand Historian biography of Xiang Yu would already know very well. As readers we must look beyond the surface meaning and ponder the author’s clues, precisely as the commentators have: just what did he intend by repeating a familiar text in a new narrative context?

Similarly, we must question the significance of the section of the narrative set in the Underworld (and the future), where Pilgrim Sun takes the place of King Yama of Hell. The treachery of Qin Hui and the bad choices that led to the loss of much of the Northern Song territory to the Jin state were fully documented in the History of the Song (Song shi). The indictments against Qin Hui are all copied from earlier texts, both the standard dynastic history and a version of that text redacted by the “heretical” Confucian thinker Li Zhi. Is there significance in the shifts between sources? Is the fictional treatment of Qin Hui in Hell justified by the text the novel cites? Does citing Li Zhi’s work suggest at least intellectual allegiance with this maverick Confucian thinker on the part of the novelist?

In these cases, entertainment seems hardly to be the point. Instead, these are literary games the novelist plays with his educated readership. Can they catch the jokes, identify the historical personages referred to only by obscure names, understand when a source has been skewed into meaning something new, for instance The Book of Changes (Yijing)?

In this regard, Further Adventures would seem to prefigure a novel that appeared nearly two centuries later, Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan) by Li Ruzhen (1763–1830). That work was published in 1828; presumably it was written by a well-read man in middle age. C. T. Hsia characterized him as a “scholar-novelist” on the basis of the enormous amounts of cultural lore he incorporated into his fiction. Referring to his own training in European literatures, Hsia remarks: “In the West we habitually associate the intellectual or erudite novel with a critical, satiric intelligence”; Flowers in the Mirror “can no longer please us” because that novel fails to free itself from endorsing the conventional values of his time.³ The learned discussion of fortune-telling in chapter 13 of Further Adventures and its satirical revision of various incidents from standard historical accounts bring Hsia’s “scholar-novelist” designation to mind.⁴ But in the context of Further Adventures, this information not only reveals the author’s great learning but also makes satirical fun of fortune-telling and its relevance: the subject here is Sun Wukong, born, as the parent novel tells us, as a consequence of the interactions of cosmic forces on a stone egg, which hatches to produce this utterly anomalous creature, a stone monkey.

Further Adventures is more than merely the “celebration of the ideals and delights of Chinese culture” that Hsia sees in Flowers in the Mirror; here our novelist pushes the limits of the Buddhist teachings of nonduality, having great fun by driving his poor Pilgrim nearly mad in the process. Presumably his readers might be similarly baffled about the direction this unique text is taking them. Even now I cannot say that I feel I have fully comprehended all it has to offer. But Qiancheng Li—especially through his monograph Fictions of Enlightenment and his critical edition of the text Xiyou bu jiaozhu—has uncovered far more significance here than any of his scholarly or critical predecessors. Working with him through this translation has allowed me to share his joy as he found new quotations from the writings of Dong Sizhang’s peers and discovered just how playful this text is. Our efforts to convey our understanding, and our appreciation, of this text to readers of English have added yet another level to our enjoyment.