I’m proud to present a PDF of the original edition of Journey to the West anonymously published in 1592 by the Shidetang (世德堂, “Hall of Generational Virtue”) publishing house of Jinling (金陵, “Gold Hill,” a.ka. Nanjing). Titled Newly Printed, Illustrated, Deluxe and Large Character, Journey to the West (Xinke chuxiang guanban dazi Xiyou ji, 新刻出像官板大字西遊記), it features 20 scrolls and 100 chapters (minus the current chapter nine). It contains many charming woodblock prints depicting the events described in the story. For example, this print shows the battle between Monkey and Nezha in their three-headed and six-armed forms.
One doctoral thesis shows that this version is based on an earlier edition of the story titled Newly printed, Completely Illustrated, Chronicle of Deliverances in Sanzang of the Tang’s Journey to the West (Xinqie quanxiang Tang Sanzang Xiyou shi ni (e) zhuan, 新鍥全像唐三藏西遊释尼(厄)傳) in ten scrolls (with three to ten chapters each) by Zhu Dingchen (朱鼎臣) of Yangcheng (羊城, i.e. Guangzhou).
The PDF is quite large at 1.5 gigs, so it will take time to download. I’ve provided two options.
Note: This post is not endorsed. I received no compensation for the review.
I have an ongoing international survey gauging the readership of Journey to the West. With almost 1,000 responses, 53.4% of the respondents have never read the novel. Another 28.8% have only read a few chapters, including abridgements. Most have learned about the story via video games, comic books, or the internet. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, as the majority of respondents come from North America (52.5%) and Europe (18.8%). Such non-Chinese speaking/reading populations do, however, have access to assorted translations. For example, the most popular English renditions are Arthur Waley’s 30-chapter abridgement Monkey (1942) and full translations like W.J.F. Jenner’s Journey to the West (2001) and Anthony C. Yu’s The Journey to the West (revised 2012 edition). Yu’s version is by far the most accurate, but it runs well over 2,000 pages (including a 100 page introduction, copious explanatory notes throughout the four volumes, and many scholarly sources), making it a daunting task to read. But what about those who wish to read the original Chinese? Well, the edition put out by the People’s Literature Publishing House (人民文學出版社, 1955/2017), for example, has 866,000 Chinese characters, and while the novel is written in the vernacular, a person would need to know 3,000 or more characters before they could comfortably read it. This means beginning students would normally have to wait years until they reached the appropriate reading level. But now they have a new option.
Jeff Pepper (writer and publisher) and Dr. Xiaohui Wang (translator) of Imagin8 Press have produced a series of bilingual retellings of the tale at the 600 and 1,200 HSK word levels, as well as a few with 1,500 based on new words introduced in past books. [1] So far there are 14 books in the series covering chapters one to 42 (Monkey’s stone birth to the defeat of Red Boy). All are available in Simplified Chinese, while (as of March 2021) only the first six books are available in Traditional Chinese. Each is divided into four parts: 1) a preface with a brief explanation of the series and a recap of the story from previous books; 2) the story proper presented in pinyin with the corresponding Chinese on the adjoining page; 3) the English translation; and 4) an alphabetized glossary of terms with four columns listing the Chinese character, pinyin, English meaning, and when new words (not part of HSK3) are “First Used” in a given book (i.e. 1, 2, 3, etc.). [2] If the First Used column is blank for a given character, this is because “the word is part of HSK3 or is in common usage” (Pepper & Wang, 2018a, p. 119). Furthermore, students have the added option of listening to audiobooks available for free on Imagin8’s YouTube channel. This means they can practice both their reading and listening skills. Needless to say, this series truly is an amazing resource.
The cover of book one. Design by Katelyn Pepper (larger version).
Now on to the story. Given the reduced word count, the tale in each book is a simplified version of the original. The first book opens on a parent telling Journey to the West as a bedtime story to their child, each subsequent volume representing a different night’s story. Certain aspects, such as the names of minor gods, immortals, and demons, as well as copious literary poems, are cut out as they don’t really affect the overall story. [3] The narrative flows smoothly and follows the general outline from Anthony C. Yu’s English translation. [4] The rhythm of pages is occasionally broken up by beautiful black and white drawings by Next Mars Media, each of which is accompanied by a bilingual caption.
Beyond a few very minor inaccuracies in the story, I only have two major complaints. One, the tendency to gloss over certain facets of the narrative resulted in the removal of one major aspect of Sun Wukong’s early training, which is the source of his most famous magic power. In the original, the Buddho-Daoist Sage Subodhi teaches Monkey the 72 transformations in order to hide from a trio of heaven-sent punishments scheduled to kill him for attaining immortality. After subsequently learning how to fly via the cloud somersault, he is expelled from the Sage’s school for showing off his newfound powers of metamorphosis to his less accomplished classmates. But in book one of the series, Wukong’s lesson on shapeshifting is mysteriously replaced with flight training. It is implied that he can simply fly away from said punishments (Pepper & Wang, 2018c, pp. 55 and 57 and 82-83). And instead of being kicked out for showing off his transformations, Subhuti simply tells him to leave because he’s “disturbing the other students” (Pepper & Wang, 2018c, pp. 57 and 83). This removal doesn’t make any sense, especially when our hero exhibits transformations in later books (Pepper & Wang, 2018b, pp. 39 and 78, for example).
Two, the Chinese sections of books one to five are very short, running between 25 to 30 pages with only 14 lines per page. The rest of the books are comprised of the aforementioned preface, the pinyin pages, the English translation, the images, and the glossary. However, book six and beyond tend to have more pages, especially those from book seven onwards as this is when the 1,200 word level is introduced. In addition, Imagin8 has produced a number of compilations, each collection containing three books (example).
For my overall rating, I would give the series 4.5 out of 5 stars. I highly recommend it for those in the early stages of learning Chinese. It will surely serve as a gateway to learning more about Chinese history, religion, and mythology.
Notes:
1) Mr. Pepper was kind enough to send me the first six volumes in Simplified Chinese back in 2019. He recently sent me the Traditional Chinese version of volume six.
2) Book one is missing this “First Used” column. It was introduced in book two under the listing “New?”. This was subsequently changed to “Used In” in book five and then “First Used” in book six.
3) The names of certain reoccurring characters, such as Heavenly King Li Jing and his son Prince Nezha, are cut in earlier books. I’d be interested to see if their full names grace later books as the characters do appear several more times in the original narrative.
4) Dr. Yu is thanked in the acknowledgements.
Sources:
Pepper, J., & Wang, X. (2018a). The Emperor in Hell (2nd ed.). Pittsburgh, PA: Imagin8 Press.
Upon the initial release, I was entranced by the cover art for the 2012 revised edition of Anthony C. Yu’s famed Journey to the West translation. For example, the cover for volume one (fig. 1) featured the pilgrims crossing the Flowing-Sands River via a boat made from Sha Wujing‘s skull necklace and a heaven-sent gourd. I loved the individuality and color scheme of each figure. They look almost like characters from a comic book. Though the art style was old, I assumed the bright, vibrant colors signaled the illustration was a modern reproduction. This was not the case. I later learned that the art was made by an anonymous painter of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The paintings from this series were later gathered into an abridged ten-volume set titled Qing-Period Color-Illustrated Complete Edition of Journey to the West (Qing caihui quanben Xiyouji, 清彩繪全本西遊記, 2008). Here I present lower res PDFs of this work, complete with the gorgeous artwork. Each page is formatted with simplified Chinese dialogue on the left side and art on the right (fig. 2).
Fig. 1 – The cover of volume one (larger version). Fig. 2 – An example of the page format (larger version). It portrays the pilgrims finally coming before the Buddha in India. The formerly subjugated “Peng of 10,000 Cloudy Miles” (i.e. Garuda) can be seen hovering above the Enlightened One’s throne.
Readers may be surprised to learn that chapter nine of the current one hundred chapter edition of Journey to the West did not appear in the original version anonymously published by the Shidetang (世德堂) publishing house in 1592. Chapter nine of course tells the story of how Tripitaka‘s parents, his scholar-official father Chen Guangrui (陳光蕊) and mother Yin Wenjiao (殷溫嬌), meet (fig. 1); Guangrui’s murder and the pregnant Lady Yin’s kidnapping by a bandit; Tripitaka’s birth and Moses-like trip down a river (hence his nickname “River Float” (Jiang liu, 江流)); his rescue, rearing, and initiation into the Buddhist order by the abbot of Gold Mountain; Lady Yin’s rescue and the bandit-turned-official’s arrest; and Tripitaka’s later reunion with his mother and father (the latter’s body having been preserved and brought back to life by heaven).
Some scholars, such as Glen Dudbridge, suggest the current ninth chapter is a forgery, having been written by one Zhu Dingchen (朱鼎臣) of Canton because it appears in his slightly later edited version of the novel titled The Chronicle of Deliverances in Tripitaka Tang’s Journey to the West (Tang Sanzang Xiyou shi ni zhuan, 唐三藏西游释尼傳, circa 1595). (See the 01/02/21update for new information about Zhu’s version of the novel.) Other scholars posit there is internal textual evidence for a possible lost chapter and that the current ninth chapter was salvaged from these internal clues.
Fig. 1 – Tripitaka’s parents from the 1986 television show.
Anthony Yu‘s (1975) paper “Narrative Structure and the Problem of Chapter Nine in the ‘Hsi-Yu Chi'” supplements previous analyses of said internal textual evidence. He demonstrates that references to the Chen Guangrui episode litter the book. For example, a poem in chapter twelve (ch. 11 of the original Shidetang version) reads:
Gold Cicada was his former divine name. As heedless he was of the Buddha’s talk, He had to suffer in this world of dust, To fall in the net by being born a man. He met misfortune as he came to Earth, And evildoers even before his birth. His father: Chen, a zhuangyuan [1] from Haizhou. His mother’s sire: chief of this dynasty’s court. Fated by his natal star to fall in the stream, He followed tide and current, chased by mighty waves. At Gold Mountain, the island, he had great luck, For the abbot, Qian’an, raised him up. He met his true mother at age eighteen, And called on her father at the capital. A great army was sent by Chief Kaishan To stamp out at Hongzhou the vicious crew. The zhuangyuan Guangrui escaped his doom: Son rejoined sire—how worthy of praise! They saw the emperor to receive his grace; Their names resounded in Lingyan Tower. Declining office, he chose a monk’s life At Hongfu Temple to seek the true Way, This old Buddha-child, nicknamed River Float, With a religious name of Chen Xuanzang. [2]
Yu (1975) notes “this passage…which introduces Tripitaka to the reader, has, with the exception of one major discrepancy (i.e. the name of the monk who took in the river-borne orphan), all the crucial elements constitutive of the Chen Guangrui story” (p. 296).
After providing several more examples, he concedes external textural evidence for a lost chapter has yet to be discovered, but suggests the author-compiler of the Journey to the West was surely familiar with established Yuan-Ming dramas involving Tripitaka’s birth and life:
I think that the foregoing analysis, admittedly brief, is sufficient to show the significance, if not the indispensability, of the Chen Guangrui episode in the narrative, though as I have remarked earlier, these later allusions certainly cannot be construed as incontrovertible proofs for a “lost chapter.” The existence of such a chapter has to be established by further discovery of textual materials hitherto unknown, if such discovery is indeed still possible. It may be safely asserted, however, that the author of the hundred-chapter novel, Wu Cheng’en or whoever he might be, is thoroughly familiar with the tradition of the birth and adventures of the infant Xuanzang popularized in the dramas of Yuan and Ming China, and that he has consciously and skillfully exploited this tradition in his narrative (Yu, 1975, p. 306).
Yu (1975) goes on to counter Dudbridge’s criticism that the Chen Guangrui episode doesn’t progress the overall plot by saying it should, instead, be accepted as an “organizing principle”, one that explains the reason for the monk’s ordeals:
[T]he theme of the river and its attendant perils utilized by the author of the hundred-chapter novel reinforces the theme of Tripitaka’s this-worldly identity as the incarnation of the banished Gold Cicada. Both themes in turn support the threefold aetiology developed in the narrative for explicating the meaning of Tripitaka’s ordeals: as a form of chastisement for his preexistent transgression, as a test of endurance for the earthly pilgrim, and as an exemplum of the high cost of obtaining sacred writings from the West (p. 307).
Furthermore, he counters Dudbridge’s claim that the concept of a lost chapter would be stronger if the novel provided more than just passing references to background info of the central characters. In fact, the novel does provide lengthy info on our heroes. For example, Yu (1975) presents a very long poem from chapter nineteen detailing Zhu Bajie’s life, from his early Daoist training, achievement of immortality, and rise to heavenly rank to his drunken flirting with the moon goddess (fig. 2), banishment from heaven, and mistaken reincarnation on earth as a pig-man.
Fig. 2 – a Taiwanese stamp featuring Zhu Bajie and the moon goddess Chang’e.
In the end, Yu (1975) states Qing-era editors of the novel were justified in their suspicion of a lost chapter given the lack of detailed info about Tripitaka’s life, unlike the other pilgrims:
In the absence of chapter 9, Tripitaka is the only member of the pilgrimage, in fact, whose origins are presented in the manner which Dudbridge ascribes to the disciples: in allusion or indirectly, in moments of retrospect. The early editors of the Xiyouji, therefore, were not wholly unjustified in their protest that a theme of such significance as the Chen Guangrui story had not been more fully accounted for by antecedent narrative (p. 310).
This has been posted for educational purposes. No malicious copyright infringement is intended. Please support the official release.
Update: 01-02-21
Zhu Dingchen’s edition of Journey to the West actually predates the 1592 edition. This shows that the aforementioned internal clues in the 1592 edition are based on previous material.
Update: 12-01-21
I’ve archived a book that shows how Tripitaka’s exile from heaven is similar to ancient Greek and Egyptian beliefs.
Update: 04-03-22
I’ve posted an entry discussing the characterization of Tripitaka as a Confucian in the novel.
Notes:
1) A scholar rank. All quotes from Yu (1975) originally use Wade-Giles. I have updated them with Pinyin.
2) Yu, 1975, p. 296. See Wu & Yu, 2012, p. 275 in Yu’s updated translation of the novel.
Sources:
Wu, C., & Yu, A. C. (2012). The journey to the West: Vol. 1. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Yu, A. (1975). Narrative Structure and the Problem of Chapter Nine in The “Hsi-Yu Chi”. The Journal of Asian Studies,34(2), 295-311. doi:10.2307/2052750
Here I present PDFs comprising the complete four volume 2012 revised edition of The Journey to the West translated by Anthony C. Yu. This is considered THE most accurate translation of the tale available. I hope those who read and enjoy the digital version will support the official release.
Anthon C. Yu (October 6, 1938 – May 12, 2015) was Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Chicago Divinity School. I shared a long email correspondence with Prof. Yu, during which we became friends. He was always quick to answer my many questions. His translation remains a treasure trove of explanatory notes and sources.
1. Book blurb
Anthony C. Yu’s translation of The Journey to the West, initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time […] With over a hundred chapters written in both prose and poetry, The Journey to the West has always been a complicated and difficult text to render in English while preserving the lyricism of its language and the content of its plot. But Yu has successfully taken on the task, and in this new edition he has made his translations even more accurate and accessible. The explanatory notes are updated and augmented, and Yu has added new material to his introduction, based on his original research as well as on the newest literary criticism and scholarship on Chinese religious traditions. He has also modernized the transliterations included in each volume, using the now-standard Hanyu Pinyin romanization system. Perhaps most important, Yu has made changes to the translation itself in order to make it as precise as possible (source).
I’ve found a digital copy of the W. J. F. Jenner four-volume box set translation of Journey to the West. I’m archiving it here for those who want to compare it with Yu’s version. Please keep in mind that the page numbers are not the same as the physical copy.
