A mass story, assembled over a long time

The notes place Journey to the West among China’s cultural types that still get remade. Scholars, they write, often call Dream of the Red Chamber the finest novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms the one popular in Asia, and Journey to the West the most widely taken up — quoted and reused not only in China but across East and Southeast Asia. They add that it reached the West in translation more than a hundred years ago.

Wu Cheng’en’s book is, in their wording, one writer’s life work, but the basic tale and the figures were gathered over a long stretch of history. That, they say, is why it can hold so many tones, and why it is classed as a shenmo novel — a tale of gods and demons — freer in invention than many older Chinese novels.

From Xuanzang’s road to the stage

Before Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, the notes say, there were already so many earlier “Journeys” that they almost need pulling together. The starting point they name is Xuanzang, who travelled alone for twenty years, more than two hundred thousand li, to India for Buddhist scriptures, and wrote the Datang Xiyuji: life and history in a hundred and thirty-odd countries, things he saw or was told. When he came home, the notes write, the welcome was loud enough to stir the country. The story passed into legend, and into Tang folk books they name: the Datang Sanzang Fashi Qujing Ji and the Datang Sanzang Qujing Shihua.

The plot, they say, follows a familiar three-part travel shape — departure, initiation, return — the kind of heroic journey the American mythologist Joseph Campbell called a monomyth. On the stage it became xiyouxi. They list, for the Yuan, Tang Sanzang Xitian Qujing and a play of Erlang Shen; for the Ming, a Journey to the West zaju and another Erlang Shen play that binds the Great Sage. That performance line, they write, still runs in jingju and in puppet theatre.

Sun Wukong, and a glance toward Hanuman

The real protagonist, the notes say, is not Tripitaka as Xuanzang’s counterpart, but the monkey Sun Wukong, who uses magic and holds the frame of the tale. Western translations often put the monkey in the title: Monkey King, a monkey’s adventure, the monkey and the pig, the monkey and the pig’s journey to the Western Regions.

They add that Sun Wukong’s image overlaps in part with Hanuman, the monkey warrior who helps Rama in the Ramayana. Where Journey to the West was loved mainly in China and north-east Asia, they write, the Ramayana found readers in South and Southeast Asia. Hanuman, in their wording, can fly with the speed of the wind, pull up trees and mountains, change size or vanish, and, for devotion to Rama, is granted an undying body. The notes do not say Sun Wukong comes only from Hanuman; because the book has a Buddhist ground, they think Indian story and Buddhist tale may have entered, directly or not. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Journey to the West as a cultural type still being remade.

Last updated: 15 November 2026