Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West (Michigan Classics in Chinese Studies)
Authors: Yueh Tung
Michigan Classics in Chinese Studies
HE
T
OWER OF
M
YRIAD
M
IRRORS
A Supplement to
Journey to the West
By Tung Yüeh (1620-1686)
Translated from the Chinese by
Shuen-fu Lin
and
Larry J. Schulz
CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
ANN ARBOR
Michigan Classics in Chinese Studies No. 1
Published by Center for Chinese Studies
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1106
Second Edition 2000
© 2000 by Regents of the University of Michigan
All rights reserved
Printed and made in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives ANSI/NISO/Z39.48–1992.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tung Yüeh, 1620-1686
[Hsi yu pu. English]
The tower of myriad mirrors : a supplement to Journey to the West / by Tung Yüeh ; translated from the Chinese by Shuen-fu Lin and Larry J. Schulz.
p. cm.—(Michigan classics in Chinese studies ; no. 1)
Originally published: Berkeley, Calif. : Asian Humanities Press, 1978.
ISBN 0-89264-142-8 (alk paper)
I. Lin, Shuen-fu, 1943-II. Schulz, Larry James. III. Wu, Ch'eng-en, ca. 1500—ca. 1582. Hsi yu chi. IV. Tide. V. Series.
PL2698.T83 H713 2000
895.1’348—dc21
00-060228
ISBN 978-0-89264-909-9 (electronic)
To Kathleen, Joanne, and Andrew; Barbara and Daniel
It is customary to speak of six “great novels” as the most important long works of traditional Chinese vernacular fiction. Two of them, a picaresque and a historical romance called, respectively,
The Water Margin
(
Shui-hu chuan)
and
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San-kuo-chih yen-i)
, come from the fifteenth century. Two more,
Journey to the West (Hsi-yu chi)
, a fantasy travelogue, and
Chin P'ing Mei
, a pornographic work of social realism, are from the sixteenth century. The last two, the satiric
The Scholars (Ju-lin wai-shih)
and
Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng)
, a novel of upper-class manners, are eighteenth-century works. The isolation of these six works as “great novels” is largely justified in that most other traditional novels were imitative of them, so that each of the six may be said at once to typify and epitomize its own subgenre of fiction.
A Western reader acquainted with these works in translation might find that they fulfill in some limited ways his conception of the premodern novel—they develop the surface aspects of narrative and characterization in order to tell a story that proceeds sequentially from one event to the next. Not unexpectedly, he will miss in them the psychological exploration and willingness to experiment with form that has characterized Western fiction since Proust and Joyce.
The seventeenth-century novel here translated as
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
was originally known as
Hsi-yu pu
in Chinese, literally “A Supplement to
Journey to the West
,” a title that suggests it belongs to the subgenre of fantasy travelogues spawned by the success of
Journey
. Yet except for the appropriation of the original novel's characters and story frame,
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
develops in directions that contrast sharply with the rest of early Chinese fiction, and in ways that are easily accessible to a modern reader versed in twentieth-century literature and its vocabulary.
One aspect of the present novel's uniqueness is its use of dream. Chinese writers traditionally used dream sequences to provide a middle plane between the human and supernatural worlds—several instances can be found in
Journey to the West
, as indicated in the summary of the novel below—or as a foil dramatizing the ephemeral quality of human life. In the latter case, a character experiences the vacillations of fate over an entire lifetime, suffering rise and decline in status, raising a family, and dying, only to awake and learn he had dreamed it all in seconds. In neither case is the logic of waking life suspended; there is merely a shift in setting that must be clearly marked if it is to be intelligible. By contrast,
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
is cast entirely as the dream of its protagonist, Monkey. Only in the last chapter do Monkey and the reader learn that the action has unfolded in the world of dream.
The sense of dream here is evoked by the surreal logic familiar to dreamers. An image suggested in a previous context becomes concrete, like the inexplicable wall that materializes inside the gate of the Emerald Green World after the Sky-walkers have told Monkey about a wall built to sever the road to the West. The idea of the wall itself is associated with an earlier mention of the First Emperor of Ch'in, consolidator of China's Great Wall. Time becomes disjointed, changing without notice from abnormal speed, as when the Hsiang Yü story takes place in the course of a single night, to the extended analysis of a single moment, as in the description of Beautiful Lady Yü's morning toilet. Or there are such uncanny occurrences as the two instances when Monkey involuntarily enters the Tower of Myriad Mirrors, once by tripping on a stone and once by being pushed into a pool of water.
The treatment of dreams in
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
goes beyond convincing description to an intuition of their psychological functions that anticipates the discoveries of modern psychology. Further, the use of dream is inseparable from the novel's Buddhist design. It may be said that the novel is equally penetrating as the recounting of Monkey's dream and as an exposition of the Buddhist, especially Ch'an (Zen), experience in terms of the unconscious mind, whose processes are revealed most graphically in dreams.
Equally unparalleled in Chinese fiction is the novel's structure, a succession of shifting perspectives that matches the fluctuating settings and time planes of the dreamscape. It starts off properly enough in the
storyteller mold inherited from
Journey to the West
, but shortly the sense of reality begins to fragment, and the story is propelled through the bits and pieces of a narrative montage. First there is the concubine's monologue, which after a descriptive interlude introduces the Mountain-removing Bell. Then there is a reading from a dynastic history and the Sky-walker's speech, both of which contain jolting revelations for Monkey. Disparate devices are used as the novel proceeds, among them Hsiang Yü's autobiographical tale, the head workman's bill of accounts, and the song of the blind singing girls, which recounts history from its mythological beginnings through dynastic times and back again to the fabled pilgrimage of
Journey to the West
.
Monkey's return to waking life is marked by the observation that the sun has not moved from the peony tree whose appearance initially set the story in motion. True to the traditional function of dream in fiction, this critical and seemingly time-consuming event in Monkey's spiritual life has all taken place in a single moment. But this well-worn formula is used not because it is a convenient way to end the story, but to bring it back to the traditional format of
Journey to the West
, which, now rectified by the supplement, can move on to its own chapter sixty-two.
In this move the novelist exhibits the level of control over his medium that is characteristic of
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
as a whole. It is made possible at least in part because Tung chose to abandon the unwieldy length favored by his predecessors. He also chose to dispense with another fixture of earlier novels, the conventional storyteller line: “And if you want to know what happened, read the next chapter.” This phrase is only used once—in chapter twelve, which builds from a narrative told in the storyteller fashion. Absent, too, are the poems inserted at battle scenes or at each passage calling for natural description, typical of novels like
Journey to the West
. Instead, description is largely confined to prose, and important settings such as the interior of the Tower of Myriad Mirrors are catalogued at length and with relish.
The Author
The author of
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
, Tung Yüeh, (styled Jo-yü), was born in 1620. His birthplace, Nan-hsün in northern Chekiang, was across Lake T'ai from Soochow, then one of the great cultural
centers of China. He was the grandson of a high official and son of a literatus who died when Tung was seven. The boy was raised an only child and passed the lowest level of the civil service examinations when he was seventeen, but apparently pursued government service no further. This was perhaps because the succession of corrupt and ineffective reigns that culminated in the destruction of the Ming court by the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty in 1644 made an official career unattractive; also perhaps because he found that preparation for the examinations, which he satirizes fiercely in
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
, detracted from his more purely intellectual pursuits. He is known to have studied the
I Ching (Book of Changes
), with an eminent scholar of the subject named Huang Tao-chou.
Tung married and had several children, but at the age of thirty-six he accepted the Buddhist tonsure and entered a monastery. Not a few intellectuals of the day sought refuge in Buddhism from service to the Ch'ing dynasty and its insistence that Chinese clothing and hair styles be replaced by those of Manchu custom. Political considerations, however, seem not to have played a significant part in the decision of Tung Yüeh, who had been interested in Buddhism from an early age, and who went on to become a respected master of the Ch'an school. He died in 1686.
Tung's biographer, Liu Fu, lists more than one hundred titles attributable to him, testament to a broad range of interests spanning the Chinese classics, particularly the
Book of Changes
, ancient Chinese history, belles-lettres, Buddhism, research in literary history, prosody, and dreams. His miscellaneous works deal with astronomy, chronology and the calendar, etymology of medicinal plant names, and the connoisseurship of incense. They also include one novel,
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
. This diversity may reflect the restless temperament of a man who was given to changing his name frequently and who occasionally threatened to burn all his literary work.
Liu also discovered a poem of 1650 dating
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
as a work of 1640, Tung Yüeh's twentieth year. This date tallies with the one given for a preface to the novel, and though critics have found it difficult to accept that a first and only novel should have achieved such depth and technical mastery, there is no documentation to counter the poem's implication that
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
is the product of a remarkably precocious mind.
The Setting
: JOURNEY TO THE WEST
Since
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
purports to supplement the earlier novel
Journey to the West
by inserting its sixteen chapters between chapters sixty-one and sixty-two of the original, it behooves us to know something of that novel, and especially the episode that generated the supplement.
Journey to the West
evolved from a story cycle based on the pilgrimage to India made by the T'ang dynasty cleric Hsüan-tsang (A.D. 602–664) in search of authentic Buddhist texts. Wu Ch'eng-en (ca. A.D. 1500–1580) put it into its present form, wherein Hsüan-tsang's role has become secondary to that of his heroic disciple, Sun Wu-k'ung, or Monkey. The story line no longer recounts the often lonely journey across Central Asia, but a fabulous adventure guided unerringly by its mission, with supernatural assistance, through lands ruled by monsters and demons. It is, as has often been pointed out, a kind of
Pilgrim's Progress
toward Buddhist salvation.
Sun Wu-k'ung is a stone monkey born from a stone egg. After establishing himself as monkey king at Water-curtain Cave in the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, he one day realizes that he, like other mortal creatures, is destined to die and sets out to see what can be done about it. He receives training in techniques of longevity and physical transformation from the Taoist Patriarch Subodhi. Returning home, he bullies the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea into giving him an enchanted cudgel that becomes his trademark and with which he later harrows Hell in a dream. These acts bring him to the attention of Heaven's Jade Emperor, who, rather than do battle with him, gives Monkey the sinecure of Groom to the Heavenly Stables. As soon as he discovers how low his status is, Monkey goes home and fights a punitive heavenly army to a stalemate, winning as a concession the title Great Sage Equal of Heaven. But soon he takes offense at being excluded from a banquet and again leaves Heaven—but not before imbibing great quantities of banquet wine and some of Lao-tzu's elixir of immortality.
The full forces of Heaven, aided by the magic of the Bodhisattva Kuan-yin, capture Monkey after a tremendous battle, but no way can be found to dispose of him. Even the alchemical fires of Lao-tzu's Eight Trigram Cauldron fail, and Monkey is able to escape, change into a six-armed, three-headed apparition brandishing three cudgels, and go on a
rampage that threatens to bring down the throne of Heaven. Finally, Buddha is called upon and proposes that if Monkey can but jump off the palm of His hand, he can be king of Heaven. Of course, the Buddha's magic proves more powerful, and Monkey is cast down beneath Five Phases Mountain, there to do penance and await the coming of Hsüan-tsang.
The story then skips ahead five hundred years to tell of Hsüan-tsang's miraculous youth. It gives an account of the T'ang emperor T'ai-tsung's dream trip to the Underworld and his plans for an elaborate mass for the dead to be said in thanksgiving for his safe return. The pious Hsüan-tsang is chosen to officiate and, at the suggestion of the disguised Kuan-yin, is entrusted to go to India in search of scriptures that will introduce Mahayana Buddhism to China. After a royal send-off, the pilgrimage is immediately beset by monsters. Hsüan-tsang watches as his several disciples are eaten but is saved himself by the Spirit of the Planet Venus and takes shelter in the house of the hunter Liu Po-ch'in. Liu accompanies him to the border of China and Five Phases Mountain, where Monkey is released from the Buddha's spell and becomes Hsüan-tsang's chief disciple. After killing the Six Thieves in defense of Hsüan-tsang, however, Monkey takes offense at his new master's scolding for taking life and runs off. Kuan-yin persuades him to return, and in the meantime has given Hsüan-tsang a flowered cap inlaid with gold as a means of disciplining Monkey. Once donned, the cap cannot be removed and contracts painfully whenever Hsüan-tsang intones a certain charm. Monkey, in agony, tears off all but a golden hoop, which remains permanently fixed on his head.
The two, thus outfitted, continue on and acquire a white horse—a transformed dragon—for Hsüan-tsang to ride, and the disciples Pigsy and Sandy, both originally monsters who submit at Kuan-yin's urging after a fight with Monkey. Master and disciples proceed along the road to the West, encountering monster after monster. All are dispatched by the entourage's fighting skills or are converted to Buddhism through the intervention of Kuan-yin and other divinities. Eventually, after passing through the appointed eighty-one trials, they obtain the scriptures, then are whisked to China and back to the Buddha's Vulture Peak retreat. Monkey and Hsüan-tsang are made buddhas and the others, saints of lesser orders.
