Immortals, witches, demons, disciples, Gods, saints, sinners, fairies, tortoises, pigs, monkeys, horses, bears, mountains, lakes, rivers, pilgrims, holy books, scriptures, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Buddhas, saviors, Emperors, Kings, Queens, spells, chants, transformers, shape shifters, magicians, generals, dragons, heaven, hell, judges, palaces, sages, spirits, caves, thieves, poison, gates, gardens, clouds, rain, drought, scholars, libraries, fights, massacres, death, hair, magic fans, monks, thunder, blind men, ancients, beheadings, murders, peaches, wizards, masters, fights, quarrels, wine, attacks, forgiveness, advisers, cannibalism, secrets, register of life and death, officials, lords, gatekeepers, bodyguards, spears, swords, priests, robes, etc, etc, etc.

That about sums it up. Mix it up, repeat, mix it up repeat. This ancient text reads like a modern movie based on comic book super heroes. They get into perilous situations where there's no hope only to be saved time and time again. The only constant is they survive. The most surprising piece of this is the repeated times when the demons threatened to eat the pilgrims with the aim of thereby achieving immortality. The pilgrims are supposed to be loosely bases on a real expedition crossing Asia seeking Sacred Scriptures. This tale has been repeated over and over and probably has morphed greatly. This is one book of four. My guess is the rest is more mix it up repeat and repeat. I'll pass. I also don't look forward to the next super hero movie. But if you like those you may want to see where this all "started". ( )

Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West tells the story of the pilgrimage of Buddhist monk Xuanzang to the “Western Regions” of Central Asia and India in order to obtain Buddhist sūtras and return them to China between 626 and 645 CE. Xuanzang wrote his own account in 646, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, which formed the outline of Wu’s novel. The novel is a humorous adventure that satires Chinese bureaucracy while also telling an allegory of enlightenment. Many in the Euro-American world know elements of the story from Arthur Waley’s 1942 abridged translation, Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China, while some elements of the story inspired Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball. Along with Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Shi Nai’an’s fourteenth-century novel Water Margin, and Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, this novel is one of the Four Classic Novels of Chinese literature. This edition presents the complete novel in four volumes, translated by William John Francis Jenner, a noted sinologist who completed this translation while working for Foreign Languages Press between 1963-1965. It features Qing Dynasty illustrations to supplement the text. ( )

Completed Volume I and II, if you don't know what happened, read the next installment.

Warning: Do not read on an empty stomach or with an empty refrigerator. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2013/04/review-of-journey-to-west-by-wu-chengen... ( )