The Nestorian Stele was a Tang Chinese stele discovered in 1625, which proved the existence of Christian communities in Chang’an during the Tang dynasty, and revealed that the church had initially received recognition by the Tang Emperor Taizong in 635. Taizong, of course, was the emperor who welcomed Xuanzang back to China and had the Big Wild Goose Pagoda built to house his scriptures. But any connection between Nestorian teachings and The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures has never been made by anyone else.
All of this strikes the modern reader as bizarre. Richard’s claims that he had discovered that Mahayana Buddhism was somehow much the same as Nestorian Christianity and that the author of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures was a closet Christian, attracted a good deal of criticism from less eccentric missionaries, in particular Bishop Moule. Richard later translated Ashvagosha’s Dacheng Qixinlun (The Mahayana Tradition on the Awakening of the Faith), further exploring his theories that Mahayana Buddhism was consonant with Christian teaching, and that recognition of this would lead to more rapid evangelization of the millions of Buddhists in China. Despite much public criticism, he persisted in this line of thought till the end of his life. His open approach to religious matters led to unexpected results. Kang Youwei, who acknowledged Richard’s influence on his thinking, dedicated himself in the later years of his life to the writing of The Book of Grand Unity, which curiously reflected many of Richard’s ideas: a world ruled by one central government, and the improvement of humanity through the spread of modern technology.
These comments are by no means meant to belittle Timothy Richard. Along with Hudson Taylor, he is regarded as one of the most influential and prolific missionaries of the non-conformist Christian tradition in China. Richard was closely involved with famine relief in North China as early as the 1870s. During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) some two hundred missionaries and their families were massacred in Shanxi. When the question of reparations was raised, the Prime Minister, Li Hongzhang, asked Richard for his advice. Richard suggested an indemnity of $500,000 be spent on establishing the Taiyuan University College (later Taiyuan University, now Taiyuan University of Technology). Richard was its Chancellor and Moir Duncan its first Principal. The Chinese government also instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to consult with Richard and the Catholic Bishop of Peking on the improvement of relations between the government and the missionaries. Both men were awarded the title of First Grade Officials of the Qing Empire.
Though essentially forgotten because the things he found important and the intricacies of the political situation in China in which he was involved are now history, and rather obscure history at that, that does not diminish his status in the eyes of specialists in the history of the Christian missions in China. His heart was in the right place. It may well be that his translation of The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures might well be the work for which he is most remembered so many decades after his death.
(5) LATER TRANSLATIONS AND ADAPTATIONS
Times change, and the missionary zeal of the nineteenth century missionaries is very foreign to the moder n reader, just as the preoccupations of late Qing China are foreign to modern Chinese. When the book was written, or compiled, novels were not taken particularly seriously. The question of authorship was not important. It was regularly ascribed to Qiu Changchun, a Taoist in the entourage of Chenghis Khan, who had also written a book with a similar title about his travels in Central Asia. Qing commentators stressed that the book had a “deeper meaning” than an adventure story about a monkey and a pig, a view reflected in Richard’s introduction: “Those who read the adventures in the book without seeing the moral purpose of each miss the chief purpose of the book. Those who may be disposed to criticize the imperfect character of the converted pilgrims, must remember that their character is in the process of being perfected by the varied discipline of life.”
The twentieth century saw the fall of imperial China and the disintegration of traditional culture. The New Thought Movement, following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, had a number of issues on its agenda, one of which was the creation of a new literary language based on the spoken language, rather than the language of the classics two thousand years earlier. Another important issue, in the words of its main spokesman, Hu Shi, was “the re-evaluation of all values.” And so The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures becomes one of the central texts of the vernacular language movement, because it was indeed written in vernacular Chinese, and was indeed popular. Literary scholars came to the conclusion that its compiler was one Wu Cheng’en, and Wu’s name is routinely given as its author. Modern specialists feel the evidence for this attribution is too weak: in Anthony Yu’s full and scholarly translation of the novel, the name of the author is simply omitted. As part of the rationalism of the New Culture Movement, the “hidden message” of the book was re-examined and found to be irrelevant, or non-existent. So Hu Shi, in his Preface to Arthur Waley’s translation, wrote, “Freed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations by Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucianist commentators… Monkey is simply a book of good humor, profound nonsense, good-natured satire, and delightful entertainment.” That is an early twentieth century assessment, and has influenced the way succeeding generations have read the story.
The original book is very long. William Jenner’s complete translation runs to 1410 pages; Arthur Waley’s translation has 314 pages. The first seven chapters of the novel deal with the Monkey’s adventures in heaven, before he becomes a disciple of Xuanzang. These contain many of the most famous stories in the book, and both Richard and Waley include them. The next chapters, with the exception of a sort of interlude in which the disciples are recruited by Guanyin to escort Xuanzang to India, are mainly concerned with their travels, encounters with various demons and other strange inhabitants of the western regions. In the last chapter Xuanzang reaches Vulture Peak, brings the sacred scriptures to China, and returns to Paradise, where he too attains Buddhahood.
The central part of the book covers the adventures of the pilgrims; each translator makes his own choice of adventures to include. Richard chose to translate the first seven chapters, the last three chapters and the chapter on hell in some detail. Waley translated about one third of the book, mainly about the Monkey, but not neglecting the Buddhist aspect of the novel. He translated most of the dialogue, but not the poetry, which, as he said “does not go well into English.” Richard included all the chapters, as did the Chinese abridgements from which he was working. He translated the poetry but the dialogue and much of the descriptive passages were shortened and simplified. Some were summarised so drastically they become incoherent: they are little more than “monkey meets demon, monkey fights demon, monkey defeats demon.” In his translations of the poetry, Richard conveys a sort of profundity within abstruseness which contributes to the particular charm of this translation. The last two chapters, the Shedding of the Mortal Body and The Mission Achieved, are the summary and real meaning of the whole book to Richard, which are very moving. The novel ends with a litany of the Names of the Buddha and in homage of all the other bodhisattvas and arhats of heaven.
The earlier stage versions of various stories in the book in local opera form were incorporated into the much more elaborate and elite Peking Opera repertoire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These also made the Monkey the central character. The role of Monkey was played by many famous actors, included the father and son Yang Yuelou (1844-1889) and Yang Xiaolou (1878-1938); and later by Li Shaochun, Li Wanchun, and Ye Shenzhang. During the late 1930s and early 1940s The Monkey King was so popular in Beijing that it was performed in several theatres simultaneously. The image of the Monkey they created is now very famous: standing on one leg, the other crossed over his knee, his hand covering his eyes as he peers into the darkness looking for demons, his eyes twitching nervously, holding his staff, and of course his chatter and his acrobatics.
In 1964 the Monkey King story was transformed into two animated cartoons produced in China, both about the Monkey with no reference to the Monk. These cartoons, Monkey Causes Havoc in Heaven and Monkey Upsets the Peach Banquet, featured Monkey as a sort of Mickey Mouse figure modelled on the Peking Opera version. There have been many other cartoon versions of the Monkey King, but the popular consensus is that none have surpassed the 1964 animations. After the Cultural Revolution the most widespread depiction of the Monkey on the stage was Monkey Beats the White Bone Demon, a modern allegory on Deng Xiaoping outwitting Jiang Qing, the widow of Chairman Mao and one of the so-called Gang of Four.
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