Fantastic Travels in the Premodern world

Focus on Monkey

"The pilgrims move through a landscape of strange kingdoms and monsters . . . the quest becomes for Monkey a structural series of challenges by which he can focus and discipline his rambunctious intellect." - Introduction, Monkey, p. 8

". . . Evliya . . . had a penchant for the legendary and miraculous. He exaggerates his adventures, sometimes to comic effect, and recounts journeys that he cannot possibly have taken." - Introduction, Çelebi's Book of Travels, p. 282

". . . the travel book, a form hovering between fact and fiction . . . " - Introduction, Gulliver's Travels, p. 431

Many of the greatest literary works of the early modern world describe remarkable journeys. Narratives as different as Monkey, Çelebi's Book of Travels, Gulliver's Travels, and Candide take their readers on extended voyages, but the terrain they cover generally bears an oblique relation to that of the real world. Why did travel books become so popular in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries? And why were the travels they purport to document so often the records of fantastic imaginary journeys? Let us consider some of the reasons.

Wanderlust in an expanding world

Between 1492 and 1750, new modes of transportation and new understanding of global geography went hand in hand. At the beginning of the period, kings and queens commissioned explorers like Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan to find the sea route to the treasures of the East that had previously been accessible only by torturous travels across Central Asia. Monkey, Arthur Waley's adaptation of the Ming novel Journey to the West, which was written down around 1592, gives us a glimpse of the overland Silk Road that reached from China to Western Europe. By the end of the period, sailing ships routinely navigated the oceans, easing the way for the sons of European gentleman to complete their educations by making the Grand Tour.

The Silk Road

Travels of Hsuan Tsang
– Link 1

Journey to the West is not merely a novel: it is an oral tradition springing from the historical journey taken by the Buddhist monk, Hsuan Tsang, who left the capital of T'ang China, Chang'an (modern Xian) in A.D. 629 to seek authoritative Sanskrit scriptures in India, and returned in 645. He wrote an account of his 10,000-mile quest, a trip that so captured the popular imagination that it became the seed for the gradual blossoming of a series of fantastic episodes. By the time the Ming novelist compiled these materials, the determined Buddhist monk had been transformed into a fictional character whose journey is made possible by an enchanting group of animal-like pilgrims who collect around him and guide his way.

The real Hsuan Tsang traveled through a dangerous landscape in a remote area that has not changed all that much. Today, the roads he took are staples of our daily news reports, for they traverse modern Afghanistan. Hsuan Tsang, for example, wrote about the huge standing Buddhas that stood in the stone recesses of the monastery at Bamiyan until they were recently effaced as icons too offensive to the version of Islam practiced by the Taliban.

The splendor and the danger of the terrain may be perceived in this photograph of the Bezeklik Grottoes in the Flaming Mountains near Turfan. Hsuan Tsang's lifetime, it should be remembered, overlaps that of Muhammad; so the area over which he passed, which has been an intersection of Buddhist and Islamic cultures for centuries, had not yet been visited by Muslims, who were a group in the making when the young monk left Chang'an.
– Link 2

Sacramental landscapes

Although Monkey would not have been composed were it not for Hsuan Tsang's real pilgrimage, the novel portrays geographical challenges as allegories of spiritual trials rather than as logistical problems open to rational negotiation. In this respect, Monkey reminds us that landscape in Chinese art and culture has always had profound moral and aesthetic value. The painting reproduced below, Fisherman's Evening Song, attributed to the eleventh-century artist Xu Daoning, was intended to be viewed as the scroll on which it is painted was unwound from right to left, drawing viewers into the scene as if they were traversing the mountains and valleys themselves. – Link 3

Writing in his Record of the Western Region, Hsuan Tsang tellingly comments on a similar mountain scene in the land he calls Baluka (in modern Wen-Su):

I proceeded northwest from this country for more than a hundred miles, crossed the Rocky Desert and arrived at the Icy Mountains. . . . The snow that accumulates in the mountain valleys remains ice through spring and summer. Although it sometimes thaws, it soon freezes over again. The road is dangerous and difficult; cold winds are pitiless and biting. There are many ferocious dragons, who create trouble for anyone who commits an offense. - Quoted in Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China, p. 100

As the tradition evolved, the dragons whose existence Hsuan Tsang clearly accepts come to the foreground of the popular narrative, while serious geography recedes from notice.
– Link 4

Another of the great Buddhist pilgrims, Matsuo Basho, is the author of TheNarrow Road of the Interior, also found in Volume D. The title of his journal, often translated as The Narrow Roadto the Deep North, as translated here subtly reminds us of the true destination of the spiritual traveler. Significantly, the monument to him pictured above is inscribed in the landscape, like so many of the titles approvingly noted by Monkey in Waley's text. Devotees left their marks on the caves and cliffs. Monkey reaches the patriarch Subodhi by following directions, which are confirmed by what designers today call "good signage." Not coincidentally, the device of the slanting moon and three stars can be construed in Chinese characters to signify "heart," as in the Heart Sutra.

On it was an inscription in large letters saying, "Cave of the Slanting Moon and Three Stars on the Mountain of the Holy Terrace." "People here," said Monkey, are really very truthful. There really is such a mountain and such a cave!" (p. 15)

Travel books as vehicles for satire

Abode of the Immortals
– Link 5

Waley's shortened version of the long Ming novel, Monkey, opens with the birth of its title character, which causes such consternation in the Daoist heavens that the Jade Emperor sends his ministers out to check up on the strange gleam coming from the mountains below. Among the literary elements shared by the travel narratives available to readers of Volume D is the opportunity they afford for satirizing one's own society by ostensibly focusing on the habits of far-off places. Wu Ch'eng-en's view of the advanced bureaucracy of the Ming Dynasty seems amused rather than critical, and the satirical view of government that occasionally surfaces in Monkey would not have been cause for official censorship. But the travel narratives of Jonathan Swift and Voltaire are carefully presented as the work of fictional characters, precisely because the real authors knew that they could be endangered by their caustic criticism of contemporary government and society, even if their observations were veiled in fiction and displaced to distant and imaginary places. If a king or a minister were offended by Candide or Gulliver's Travels, Dr. Ralph and Lemuel Gulliver were to blame.

Title page, Candide
– Link 6

Title page, Gulliver's Travels
– Link 7

Emblematic and allegorical elements in fabulous travel narratives

Gibbons in a landscape: The monkey in Chinese art
– Link 8

Travel journals of all sorts offer random comments on human nature and society; the fictional accounts often underscore the critical intent of these seemingly offhand observations by signaling the reader through wittily chosen names and descriptive details. Voltaire, for example, tells us a great deal about his characters by giving them evocative names (Candide, Pangloss, Cacambo, and so on); the names of Swift's Yahoos and Houhynhnms mimic the characteristic sounds of their kind.

Among the many delights that gradually embroidered the historical Hsuan Tsang's journey to the west are the the motley crew of pilgrims who accompany the fictional Hsuan Tsang. Nicknamed Tripitaka, the "three baskets" of Buddhist scriptures, the T'ang monk takes his identity from the holy writ he sought and found. Similarly, the moral and spiritual qualities that his companions represent endow them not only with names but with appropriate animal embodiments. As native inhabitants of Asia, monkeys and their relatives play an important role in Asian art; moreover, as a figure in the Chinese Zodiac, the monkey comes with a whole system of ready-made references. Western readers need to ask themselves what human behaviors Monkey's antics resemble. Knowing that Ming philosophy spoke of "the monkey of the mind" helps us to understand that the creature who calls himself "Great Sage Equal to Heaven" is more than simply mischievous: he stands as well for the mental activity of which we are so proud, and which so often gets us into trouble. And most of us have no trouble understanding what it means to be piggy.
– Link 9

From Monkey. Pigsy succumbs to earthly temptations by accepting food, while Xuanzang, unmoved, and Monkey look on. From Journey to the West by Wu Ch'eng-en, woodblock book, Chinese, 18th century.
– Link 10

Pilgrims and voyagers

The ultimate goal of a journey is a key toward differentiating the mode of various travel narratives. Do the characters learn anything? Do they reach their destination? The historical Hsuan Tsang succeeded in his quest to bring back scriptures and create a more mature Buddhist faith in China. One of the Sutras that he translated from Sanskrit into Chinese has even been attributed to his own hand. In the full version of Journey to the West, the lonely Hsuan Tsang is taught the "Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra," often referred to simply as the Heart Sutra. Central to this teaching is the enigmatic notion that "Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form." This statement announces a key Buddhist truth, and in the episodes from Monkey in our anthology, we should look for evidence that appearances deceive. In a realistic touch, like many travelers on the actual Silk Road, early in their journey, Monkey and Hsuan Tsang encounter robbers; but studying the names of the robbers ("Eye that Sees and Delights," for instance) tells us that they are allegories of the senses that lead us astray. To learn that "form is emptiness" is to learn that eyes deceive, as the events in the Kingdom of Crow-cock make abundantly clear.

Tutelary spirits

The ultimately benign Buddhist cosmos of Monkey is most easily grasped when we consider the way the landscape provides assistance to the pilgrims every time they confront an apparently insurmountable problem. Commanding the divinities of the rivers and mountains who aid the pilgrims as they go are the Bodhisattva of Compassion (Kuan-yin) and the Bodhisattva of Justice (Manjusri). To reach one's goal, however, in the final analysis one has to earn the attention of these powerful saint-like figures; and the journey to the west, like so many travel narratives, is finally about the inner landscape of the travelers' hearts and souls.

Kuan-yin, from an image painted on the wall of a cave along the Silk Route during the T'ang Dynasty
– Link 11

Manjusri on his lion
– Link 12