BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Journey to the West
"‘We all wish we were monkey but we think we're Tripitaka, we suspect we're really Tripitaka because Tripitaka is, he's, for someone who was in reality a great Buddhist scholar, the way he's portrayed in the novel, he’s very feeble, he's hungry, he's tired, he doesn't fancy it, it doesn't doesn't seem fun anymore. He would quite happily drop the whole thing but monkey is as you yourself said in the in the introduction he is irrepressible. Nothing stops him. There is no monster and 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 gonna get out of this one, kind of thing. Those all is 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 somehow, it so it's, it's repetitious, you kind of know what's coming. It's like watching a serial. And that may reflect its its origins in in oral storytelling.’…
‘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 attitudes. So, 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 to back chat 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 artlessnes of an impulsive child. So the crime that gets him into big trouble with Heaven is eating all these peaches and wines and elixirs, 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 this element of picaresque mischief making remains a constant throughout the book, you we see monkey joking and cheeking his way through dozens of tight corners on the pilgrimage to India and, and he's also believable, he seems human because he's, he's flawed. He's arrogant and impatient. So he doesn't begin and end the book as some kind of supernatural saint but he, it’s rather, as Chiung-yun was saying he is tamed or tempered. So he slowly and often quite painfully, learns to control his reckless instincts.’...
‘There's great fluidity between Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism in this novel. Does this question 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 is 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, when I was much younger and reading the novel, of, just like many other readers, monkey’s, of course, my favorite because like, he's, he's so smart. And he always comes out like on plans and his word and all the powers he has.
But really, you think about you think about it, he also has his own flaws, right? He is prone to violence, and he's quick tempered. And really, he has a very strong ego. If we read the first seven chapters, carefully, you will notice that one thing that he cared most is about being recognized. So yes, he has the power, he’s kind of climbing up a social ladder, from just a carefree monkey, and then in the East Island, and then gradually, he moved outward and become like one in the heaven. Okay. 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.’...
‘The book absolutely tells us really fascinating things about Ming China's perceptions of the world beyond its borders. So on the one hand, it's, 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 travelers 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 Tang 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.’
‘Not only not only does everybody speak Chinese all the way they go, the food is Chinese. So so it is all, the D, it's always fried noodles, the demons are attempting Pigsy with. And then the, 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 scatalogical 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 travel in a kind of China bubble.
And I think that's kind of interesting, too… 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 elements, strong elements of satire there’...
'Mao Zedong, the chairman of the of the Communist Party after 1949. He's a big fan. he's a he's a keen reader, he's a big fan. This 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'"
