Journey to the West – Chapter 1.1

First, a note on retelling Journey to the West. As a part of this, I wanted to share with you some of the decisions I made during translation, but I don’t want to distract from the story, so I’ve inserted them footnotes with mouseover text. There are these decisions almost everywhere. (For touchscreen viewers, clicking on the footnotes will also take you to the mouseover text.) Now, on with the show 🙂

At the very top of Huaguo Mountain, there was a divine stone.

The stone was 36 feet 5 inches tall, and 24 feet around.⁶ No shade from trees touched it on any side, but irises and orchids blossomed at its base. One day, the stone split open and produced a stone egg. Exposed to the wind, the egg became a stone monkey.

The monkey was fully grown. He could see and hear, walk and climb. He faced north, south, east, and west, and bowed to each direction. His eyes shone with beams of golden light that, as he looked up, pierced the sky all the way to the Polaris Palace,⁷ startling the Most High Sage, the Merciful and Awesome Jade Emperor inside the Lingxiao Cloud Palace,⁸ where he was attended by his immortal court. Seeing the flashing light, he commanded two advisors – the Far-seeing Eye⁹ and the Sharp-hearing Ear¹⁰ – to go out the North Gate and investigate. The two went out, saw truly and heard clearly, then hurried back to report: “By your command, we saw and heard the source of the golden light. On the Eastern Continent, in the small kingdom of Aolai, there is the mountain of Huaguo. On the mountain there is a divine stone. The stone birthed a stone monkey, who is bowing to the four directions. His eyes are the source of the golden light. Now that he is eating and drinking, the light will soon fade.” The Jade Emperor replied, “With the affairs of the beasts below, born of the earth, we need not be concerned.” 

On the mountain, the monkey lived without a care on the mountain’s bounty. He drank from streams, ate grasses and fruits, slept at the base of cliffs, and played in the caves. He befriended all the other living creatures – wolves and insects, tigers and deer, weasels and monkeys.¹¹ In such a place, time does not flow the way it does for us, and there is no need to keep track of it.

One hot morning, all of the monkeys were playing under the shade of the pine trees – climbing trees, picking fleas, chasing dragonflies, scratching and digging and monkeying around.¹² After playing for a while, they went to bathe in a mountain stream. It was a lively stream, with fast-flowing water that bubbled and splashed. Seeing this, the monkeys said: “There’s nothing to do today; let’s follow the stream and find out where the water comes from. It will be fun!” The whole crowd – male and female, old and young – all went running and climbing up the mountain until they came to a waterfall. The waterfall hung from the rocks like a curtain, white and foaming.

He closed his eyes, crouched, and then sprang into the waterfall. There was no water inside. Instead, there was an iron bridge. The water emerged from a hole in the rocks hung down, completely obscuring the bridge from outside. Walking across the bridge, he saw that it looked like someone had once lived there. It was a wonderful place.

Through mist-diffused light, he could see that moss and indigo carpeted the ground. No one could be seen through the windows. The rooms were utterly still. A large stone hearth showed signs of use. Clay jars had dregs of prior contents. There were lovely stone chairs, stone beds, stone platters and stone bowls. He saw elegant bamboo stands and plum trees full of blossoms.

He looked around for a long time. Then from the middle of the bridge he saw a stone tablet which proclaimed in big words: The Paradise of Huaguo Mountain, The Heaven of Shuilian Cave.¹⁵ The stone monkey was beside himself with delight. He turned around, crouched, and jumped out through the water. Laughing, he called: “You won’t believe it! What a stroke of good luck!”¹⁶ The crowd surrounded him and asked, “What is it like inside? How deep is the water?” The stone monkey said, “There isn’t any water. There is an iron bridge. On the other side of the bridge is a home built by heaven and earth.” The crowd said, “What do you mean, ‘a home’?” The stone monkey laughed and said: “This waterfall that conceals the cave entrance flows under the bridge. By the bridge, there are flowers and trees, and there is a stone house. Inside there are stone pots, stone hearths, stone bowls, stone plates, stone beds, and stone chairs. And in the center there is a stone tablet that says “The Paradise of Huaguo Mountain, The Heaven of Shuilian Cave.”¹⁷ It’s the perfect place for us to settle down. There’s plenty of room, enough for thousands of us. If we live there, we’ll be protected from the whims of the weather. We’ll be safe from the wind, rain, snow, and storm. It truly is our great fortune!”

To be continued…

^{1 The story opens with the creation of the world and establishing the temporal cosmology of Buddhism. ↩}

^{2 These are four continents from Buddhist cosmology, and not a reference to geographical locations. They have names, but I found them distracting and not really relevant to the story. ↩}

^{3 花果山, Huaguo Shan, is translated by Dr. Yu as Flower-Fruit Mountain. However, in English when we talk about foreign place names, we typically transliterate rather than use the literal meaning. Both approaches lose some something. ↩}

^{4 This whole description is a poem in the original text. In English storytelling we are not used to reading description as poetry, and maintaining a poetic structure was awkward, so I rewrote it in prose. ↩}

^{5 This conclusion is my own addition, and not part of the original text. ↩}

^{6 These numbers correspond to the 365 days of the year and the 24 ‘months’ in the traditional Chinese calendar. ↩}

^{7 The literal meaning here is ‘The North Star seat of government’. I’m not aware of an English word that means ‘seat of government’ except maybe ‘capitol’? But this is not a city, and we’ve got an Emperor, so I’ve gone with ‘palace’ here. Think maybe ‘Buckingham Palace’. ↩}

^{8 This one got awkward. Cloud refers to the type of palace it is. Lingxiao is the name of the palace. ↩}

^{9 The literal meaning is ‘Thousand Mile Eye.’ It seems to be both his name and his title. As you’ll soon see, people back then had a lot of names. ↩}

^{10 I’ve gone for paraphrasing the general gist of an idea here. His name actually means ‘Along the Wind Ear’ (顺风耳）, as in sound travels on the wind to him, presumably. However, the phrase 顺风 also has connotations of ‘smooth and successful’ in Chinese, and we’ll often wish that your travels are 顺风 ‘with the wind’. ↩}

^{11 The original text loves to use long lists with parallel structure to describe things. I didn’t really try to make that happen. ↩}

^{12 Again, this was a very long list with parallel structure. I’ve condensed it drastically, leaving out the part about how the monkeys built pagodas and worshiped Bodhisattvas. ↩}

^{13 The text here literally says ‘Good water! Good water!’ It doesn’t really work in English. ↩}

^{14 In Chinese, you can repeat short sentences for emphasis. In English, this doesn’t have the same effect, so once again I’ve tried to keep it sounding natural in English rather than preserve accuracy. ↩}

^{15 This translation gave me so much trouble. The grammar just does not work in English – and this is also not how English labels places. This tablet identifies the cave as one such that a Daoist Sage might live in. ↩}

^{16 This is again a repetition in Chinese, something like ‘A change of fortune! A change of fortune!’ ↩}

^{17 Shuilian Cave is traditionally translated as Water-Curtain Cave. ↩}