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The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 1
Translated and Edited by Anthony C. Yu
576 pages | 1 halftone, 3 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2012
Asian Studies: East Asia
Literature and Literary Criticism: Asian Languages
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Journey to the West Hardcover – January 1, 1982
- Print length 575 pages
- Language English
- Publisher Foreign Languages Press
- Publication date January 1, 1982
- ISBN-10 0835110036
- ISBN-13 978-0835110037
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Product details
- Publisher : Foreign Languages Press; First Edition (January 1, 1982)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 575 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0835110036
- ISBN-13 : 978-0835110037
- Item Weight : 1.58 pounds
- #26,134 in Family Saga Fiction
- #167,925 in Action & Adventure Fiction (Books)
About the authors
W. j. f. jenner.
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Anthony C. Yu
Cheng'en Wu
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Journey to the West: Introduction
by That's Mandarin | Oct 11, 2022 | Guest Blogs & Media
To spark your interest, our guest author Jeff Pepper from Imagin8 Press has shared a brief introduction of the book.
TIP: Scroll the the bottom of the article to discover links to a version of the book written for English-speaking students of Chinese!
Q: What is Journey to the West about?
Journey to the West (西游记, Xīyóu Jì), is a Chinese novel written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng’en (吴承恩, Wú Chéng’ēn).
It is probably the most famous and best-loved novel in China and is considered one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. Its place in Chinese literature is roughly comparable to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey in Western literature. Wikipedia sums up the book’s role perfectly, saying, “Enduringly popular, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment by the power and virtue of cooperation.”
Q: Is Journey to the West based on a real story?
The novel’s storyline is loosely based on an actual journey by a Buddhist monk also called Xuanzang who traveled from the city of Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) westward to India in 629 A.D. and returned 17 years later with priceless knowledge and texts of Buddhism.
Q: In short, what is Journey to the West about?
A long time ago, in a magical version of ancient China, the great Tang Empire is ruled by an emperor named Taizong. Due to a mixup involving the wrongful execution of a dragon king, Taizong falls ill, dies, and is dragged down to the underworld. There he comes face to face with the Ten Kings of the Underworld, survives a harrowing journey through hell, and finally escapes with the help of a deceased courtier.
When Taizong returns to the human world he is a changed man. He decides to send a monk to the Western Heaven (that is, India), to visit the Buddha, obtain holy scriptures, and bring them back to the people of the Tang Empire. This task is nearly impossible, requiring the crossing of thousands of miles of wild and dangerous territory. With guidance from the bodhisattva Guanyin, the emperor selects a young monk named Xuanzang.
Xuanzang is a brilliant young man but has a complicated history. In an earlier lifetime centuries before, he was a student of the Buddha but was careless in his studies. Expelled from the Buddha’s temple, he spent the next ten lifetimes meditating and acquiring merit. As an infant in his current lifetime he is nearly killed by bandits, placed in a floating basket by his widowed mother and sent downriver, rescued by a monk, and raised in a monastery. At age eighteen he learns his true history, and goes off to avenge his father’s death.
Later he is chosen by Taizong to undertake the epic journey to the west. Now called Tangseng (“monk from Tang”), he faces a near-impossible task: he must cross hundreds of mountains and thousands of rivers, and survive encounters with a horrifying series of bandits, monsters, demons, ghosts, evil kings, scheming monks, false Buddhas, and much more.
Q: How about the Monkey King and other famous characters?
Tangseng could never survive the journey on his own. Fortunately he acquires three powerful but deeply flawed disciples.
First is the monkey king Sun Wukong (孙悟空, S ūn W ù kōng , his name means “ape awakened to the void”), who he frees from a 500-year imprisonment under a mountain in punishment for creating havoc in heaven.
Second is Zhu Bajie (猪八戒, Zhū Bājiè, “pig of the eight prohibitions”), a gluttonous pig-man who is constantly fighting, and often succumbing to, his desires for food, sex and comfort.
And third is Sha Wujing (沙悟净, Shā Wùjìng, “sand seeking purity”), a reformed man-eating river demon.
All three have been converted to Buddhism by the monk, but they often slip back into their bad habits and cause Tangseng a great deal of trouble. Fortunately they all have great magical powers which come in handy for battling demons and monsters, and saving Tangseng from all sorts of trouble.
The story of this journey is described in this epic novel.
Q: How long is the original book?
The original Journey to the West is a very long book. It contains 100 chapters and is 588,000 Chinese characters long. It uses a very large vocabulary of 4,500 different words, over 90% of which are not included in HSK Levels 1-6, making it quite difficult for most non-native Chinese speakers to read.
The novel is also available in English translation, the best one being by the scholar Dr. Anthony Yu. His version fills four volumes and runs over 2,300 pages.
Q: Is the book suitable for Chinese beginners?
Fortunately for people learning to read Chinese, there is now another way to read this book. My writing partner Xiao Hui Wang and I have spent the last five years writing a series of 31 books that retell the Journey to the West story in language that is accessible to anyone learning to read Chinese at the HSK 3 level. The stories in these books are told in a way that matches the original as closely as possible, but because they are graded readers they are much easier to read. The first book, Rise of the Monkey King, is relatively short and uses just 512 Chinese words. Each book adds more new words and slightly increases the length of the story and complexity of the writing, leading step by step to the longest and most challenging book, Book 31, The Final Trial. All told, the entire series uses about 2,200 different Chinese words excluding proper nouns.
Fortunately, the original novel is not written as a single continuous story, but is broken up into more or less standalone episodes, each one between one and four chapters in length. This makes it possible to read and enjoy any of the 31 graded readers without having to read the ones that came before it.
Each book is written in Simplified Chinese. The books include pinyin, English translation, and a glossary. Free audio versions of each book are available free of charge on YouTube.
Q: Where can I get these books?
A list of all 31 books in the series, along with short descriptions and links to the Amazon product pages and free YouTube audiobooks, can be found on the Imagin8 Press home page, www.imagin8press.com .
by Jeff Pepper
Jeff Pepper ([email protected]) is President and CEO of Imagin8 Press , and has written dozens of books about Chinese language and culture.
Over his thirty-five year career he has founded and led several successful computer software firms, including one that became a publicly traded company. He’s authored two software related books and has been awarded three U.S. patents.
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IMAGES
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First part deals with the Monkey "Sun Wukong" who loots the heavens. Second part, the Pig "Zhu Bajie", i.e."Eight Precepts Pig," tastes his cosmic issues sometimes in conflict with the Monkey. The third part, the river "Sha Wujing", i.e. "Friar Sand," is banished for dishonoring the Queen Mother of the West.The fourth part, the horse "Yulong" experiences tribulation since he blazed the ...
Here I present PDFs comprising the complete four volume 2012 revised edition of The Journey to the West ( Xiyouji , 西遊記) translated by Anthony C. Yu (October 6, 1938 - May 12, 2015). This is considered THE most accurate translation of the tale available. I hope those who read and enjoy the digital version will support the official release.
Addeddate 2016-06-09 23:05:06 Identifier JourneyToTheWest Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t44r2md66 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0
Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers. ... Read now or download (free!) Choose how to read this book Url Size; Read online (web) ... Journey to the West Alternate Title: 西游记 Alternate Title: Xi you ji Language: Chinese: LoC Class:
Journey to the West Journey to the West 2 • Chapter 90 • Chapter 91 • Chapter 92 • Chapter 93 ... Read Difficulties Resolved on the Journey to the West. In the arithmetic of the universe, 129,600 years make one cycle. ... As the Book of Changes says, "Great is the Positive; far−reaching is the Negative! All things are
Monkey leapt down from his tree, and coming forward said with a bow, "Fairy boy, I am a pupil who has come to study Immortality. I should not dream of making a disturbance.". " You a pupil!" said the boy laughing. "To be sure," said Monkey. "My master is lecturing," said the boy.
Journey to the West (Chinese: Xiyou ji 西遊記) is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en.It is regarded as one of the greatest Classic Chinese Novels, and has been described as arguably the most popular literary work in East Asia. Arthur Waley's 1942 abridged translation, Monkey, is known in English-speaking countries.
First published in 1952, The Journey to the West, volume I, comprises the first twenty-five chapters of Anthony C. Yu's four-volume translation of Hsi-yu Chi, one of the most beloved classics of Chinese literature. The fantastic tale recounts the sixteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Hsüan-tsang (596-664), one of China's most illustrious religious heroes, who journeyed to India with four animal ...
Books. Journey to the West. Wu Cheng'en. Real Reads, 2011 - Juvenile Fiction - 64 pages. In ancient China a magical monkey appears, creating chaos everywhere he goes. The only way to put his tricks and talents to good use is to make him protector of Xuanzang, a young and handsome monk determined to travel from China to India in search of the ...
Journey to the West, foremost Chinese comic novel, written by Wu Cheng'en, a novelist and poet of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The novel is based on the actual 7th-century pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (602-664) to India in search of sacred texts. The story itself was already a part of Chinese folk and literary tradition in the form of colloquial stories, a poetic novelette ...
4.25. 1,653 ratings146 reviews. First published in 1592, The Journey to the West, volume I, comprises the first twenty-five chapters of Anthony C. Yu's four-volume translation of Hsi-yu Chi, one of the most beloved classics of Chinese literature. The fantastic tale recounts the sixteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Hsüan-tsang (596-664), one of ...
Anthony C. Yu's translation of The Journey to the West,initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, The Journey to the West tells the story of the fourteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang, one of China's most famous religious heroes, and his three supernatural ...
First published in 1952, The Journey to the West, volume I, comprises the first twenty-five chapters of Anthony C. Yu's four-volume translation of Hsi-yu Chi, one of the most beloved classics of Chinese literature. The fantastic tale recounts the sixteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Hsüan-tsang (596-664), one of China's most illustrious religious heroes, who journeyed to India with four animal ...
The first thing to know about Monkey is that it is a version of a story called Journey to the West . Journey to the West was first published in 1592 with the Chinese title Hsi Yu Ki, ( Records of the Western World ); this was translated into English as Journey to the West. We're reading a classic translation of Hsi Yu Ki called Monkey.
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.
The Journey to the West was regarded in China as one of the great masterpieces of its era. Since the publication in 1592 you find it in any number of adaptations, comic books, film, TV series, stage dramas, rewritings, abridgements. Hwang: The thing that kind of pleasantly surprised me the first time I encountered Journey to the West is really ...
Books. Monkey King: Journey to the West. Wu Cheng'en. Penguin, Feb 9, 2021 - Literary Collections - 384 pages. A Chinese Lord of the Rings and one of the all-time great fantasy novels--which Neil Gaiman has said "is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people"--now in a thrilling new one-volume translationA Penguin Classics Hardcover A shape-shifting ...
The original Journey to the West is a very long book. It contains 100 chapters and is 588,000 Chinese characters long. It contains 100 chapters and is 588,000 Chinese characters long. It uses a very large vocabulary of 4,500 different words, over 90% of which are not included in HSK Levels 1-6, making it quite difficult for most non-native ...
A lot of people are familiar with this one, it's where the names "Pigsy" and "Sandy" came from that are commonly used in English. This version is only about 100 pages and is /heavily/ abridged. You only get a handful of the 81 adventures that are in the full story. I also think that the language is starting to feel a little dated as it was ...
Monkey King: Journey to the West is at once a rollicking adventure, a comic satire of Chinese bureaucracy, and a spring of spiritual insight. With this new translation, the irrepressible rogue hero of one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature has the potential to vault, with his signature cloud-somersault and unerring sense ...
Ethan Morton played in 132 games at Purdue, including 29 starts in the 2022-23 season. Morton announced he'll play his final season at Colorado State.