Waley, Hu Shih, and the English names of Journey to the West

51.52° N, 0.13° W · London · 1942

In 1942 George Allen & Unwin in London published Monkey, Arthur Waley's translation of the Ming novel 西遊記 Xiyou ji, Journey to the West. The Chinese book has 100 chapters and, by David Lattimore's count, about 750 poems and verse passages. Waley kept 30 chapters. His preface describes the method: he left out whole episodes, translated the episodes he kept almost in full, and dropped most of the verse, "which go very badly into English." His names for the pilgrims, Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and Tripitaka, are also the names in Julia Lovell's 藍詩玲 Monkey King (Penguin, 2021).

The oldest surviving edition names no author. The Shidetang 世德堂 of Nanjing printed it as 新刻出像官板大字西遊記 (newly cut, illustrated, official-format, large-character Xiyou ji), and four copies are known, three in Japan and one in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Its first chapter credits a collator, 華陽洞天主人校 (corrected by the Master of the Huayang Grotto-Heaven), and the printer, 金陵世德堂梓行 (cut and issued by the Shidetang of Jinling). The preface by Chen Yuanzhi 陳元之 says 西遊一書不知其何人所為 (no one knows who made this book). It is dated 壬辰, a year of the sixty-year cycle. Most scholars read it as 1592; Huang Yongnian 黃永年 read it as 1532.

Qing editions credited the novel to the Daoist patriarch Qiu Chuji 丘處機 (1148–1227), whose disciple Li Zhichang 李志常 had written an account of Qiu's journey to Chinggis Khan under the same title. The attribution in use today began with Qing scholars from Huai'an, who connected the novel to an entry in the Huai'an prefectural gazetteer printed in 1626. In the 1920s Lu Xun 魯迅 copied the gazetteer material for Hu Shih 胡適, and Hu Shih's 〈西遊記考證〉 ("A textual study of Xiyou ji," 1923) and Lu Xun's 《中國小說史略》 (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction) made Wu Cheng'en 吳承恩 the standard author. The entry reads 吳承恩：《射陽集》四冊，□卷；《春秋列傳序》；《西遊記》 (Wu Cheng'en: Sheyang ji, four volumes, chapter count blank; a preface to the Chunqiu liezhuan; Xiyou ji). It gives a title and says nothing about a novel, and Huang Yuji's 黃虞稷 catalogue of Ming books, 《千頃堂書目》, lists 吳承恩《西遊記》 under geography, between two travel records. Zhang Peiheng 章培恒 made the systematic case against the attribution in 1983, Glen Dudbridge judged its grounds very weak, and the title page of Anthony C. Yu's 余國藩 complete translation carries no author's name.

The English versions before Waley record the change of author. Herbert Giles summarized the novel with extracts in A History of Chinese Literature (1901), where Monkey becomes "Master of the Horse to God." Timothy Richard 李提摩太 published A Mission to Heaven in Shanghai in 1913 and credited it to "Ch'iu Ch'ang Ch'un, A Taoist Gamaliel who became a Nestorian Prophet and Advisor to the Chinese Court." He translated chapters 1 to 7, chapter 11 on Hell, and chapters 98 to 100 nearly in full, outlined the rest, and read the book as Christian allegory, with the Jade Emperor 玉帝 as "God." Helen M. Hayes's The Buddhist Pilgrim's Progress (1930), a 105-page retelling that thanks Richard, puts "Wu Ch'eng-en" on its title page and cites Hu Shih.

Waley translated from a text "published by the Oriental Press, Shanghai, in 1921," with "a long and scholarly introduction" by Hu Shih; which edition that is has not been established. Hu Shih also introduced the American edition (New York: John Day, 1943), in a text signed 15 December 1942 that calls the authorship "authentically established." In 1923 he had written that 「《西遊記》被這三四百年來的無數道士和尚秀才弄壞了」 (Journey to the West has been ruined over these three or four hundred years by countless Daoists, monks and licentiates). The American introduction makes the same argument: "Freed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations," the book offers "good humor" and "good-natured satire." Waley's preface names "Wu Ch'êng-ên, of Huai-an" as the author, as Hu Shih did, but it reads the pilgrims as allegorical types: Tripitaka as "the ordinary man," Monkey as "the restless instability of genius," Pigsy as the physical appetites.

The monkey's surname is made from the parts of a Chinese character. In chapter 1 the Patriarch Subhūti 須菩提祖師 asks the stone monkey his 姓 (surname), and the monkey answers 「我無性」 (I have no temper), a pun on two words pronounced xìng. The Patriarch then derives a surname from 猢猻 (macaque). Without the animal radical, 猢 leaves 古月, "old" and "yin," which cannot give birth; 猻 leaves 子系, "boy" and "infant," 「正合嬰兒之本論」 (exactly the root doctrine of the Infant), so the surname is 孫. The religious name 悟空 Wukong, "awakened to emptiness," takes 悟 from a twelve-character lineage sequence. In chapter 8 Guanyin names the pig 豬悟能 and the river monster 沙悟淨, choosing their surnames by pointing at the body and at the sand (指身為姓, 指沙為姓).

Richard and Waley both explain the 姓/性 pun and drop the radical analysis, and they treat the shared 悟 differently. Richard keeps one English word across the three names: Wukong is "Seeker of Truth" (earlier "Searcher of Secrets"), Wuneng "Seeker after Strength" and Wujing "Seeker after Purity." W. J. F. Jenner, who translated the whole novel for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, does the same with "Awakened to Emptiness," "Awakened to Power" and "Awakened to Purity." Waley glosses only the first, as "Aware-of-Vacuity." His English names each cover more than one Chinese name: in his chapter 14 "Monkey" stands where Tripitaka gives the nickname 行者 (postulant), and "Pigsy" stands for 豬, 豬剛鬣 and 悟能. The monk's title 三藏 Sanzang, "three baskets," is the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit tripiṭaka, and Waley's "Tripitaka" turns it back into Sanskrit.

The office title in chapter 4 has the same problem with sound. The Jade Emperor makes Monkey 弼馬溫 in the Imperial Stables; Monkey learns that the post is 「未入流」 (outside the ranked grades) and leaves. The novel does not explain the title. It is usually read as a homophone of 避馬瘟 (ward off horse plague), and the practice behind that reading is recorded: the 《本草綱目》 (Compendium of Materia Medica) quotes a horse manual, 「馬廄畜母猴，辟馬瘟疫」 (keep a macaque in the stable to ward off horse plague). Richard's chapter heading has "Stud Master," Waley wrote "Pi-ma-wên," Yu "pi-ma-wen," and Jenner "Protector of the Horses." None of these carries the pun.

The allegory is printed in the oldest surviving edition. Chen Yuanzhi's preface reports an older preface that took the monkey 「以為心之神」 (as the spirit of the mind) and the horse as the galloping of the will. The 1592 chapter titles call Sun Wukong 心猿, the mind-monkey, and the dragon horse 意馬, the horse of the will. The chapter titles also use names from internal alchemy. 金公 (Metal Lord) for Monkey and 黃婆 (Yellow Dame) for Sha Wujing occur in Zhang Boduan's 張伯端 《悟真篇》 (Awakening to Reality), and 木母 (Wood Mother) for Pig is the alchemists' name for mercury. Chapter 86 is titled 「木母助威征怪物　金公施法滅妖邪」 (Wood Mother lends force to subdue the monster; Metal Lord uses his magic to destroy the demon). None of these terms appears in Waley's text.

The complete translations render that vocabulary. Jenner worked on his translation from the winter of 1964/65 until the Press stopped him in 1967, and again from 1978; his first two volumes came out in 1982 and 1984, and he finished over the next two summers. His version is uncut, sets the verse as blank verse, and has no footnotes. Yu published four volumes in Chicago between 1977 and 1983. Lattimore found his text substantially the 1592 edition with one added episode from a short version of the novel: Xuanzang's birth story, which Dudbridge traced to Zhu Dingchen's 朱鼎臣 short version and which entered the 100-chapter text as chapter 9 in a Kangxi-era edition. Yu's translation is complete, verse included, and renders the alchemical names consistently as "Metal Squire," "Wood Mother" and "Yellow Hag." Jenner's 金公 changes from chapter to chapter.

Lovell's version is closer to Waley's in scope. It works from the 1954 Chinese edition, draws on 49 of the 100 chapters for 36 chapters of its own, is about a quarter of the original's length, keeps Waley's names, and cuts or condenses most of the poems. Zhu Jiachun 朱嘉春 and Luo Xuanmin 罗选民 report that her translator's preface calls the puns hard to translate without notes and says that notes would weaken the humour, so she deleted them. In chapter 14 an old man calls Tripitaka a 唐人 (a man of Tang), and Monkey shouts that he is no 糖人 (sugar man) either. Waley kept the pun with a footnote, "Sugar in Chinese is T'ang," and Yu kept it with an endnote. Lovell translates 唐 as "Chinese" and drops the pun.

The Euclid installment of this series placed Ricci and Xu Guangqi between Xuanzang's rules for when to transliterate a Buddhist term and Yan Fu's three standards. Those books were translated into Chinese; this one went into English. Its pilgrim is Xuanzang 玄奘 himself, who by Lattimore's account brought back 657 texts and translated 75 of them with his helpers. The novel's last chapter takes the scriptures to the 雁塔寺 (Wild Goose Pagoda Temple) in Chang'an. In Xi'an the Big Wild Goose Pagoda was begun under Xuanzang in 652 to hold what he brought back from India; the standing building is a later rebuilding.

If you have worked with Republican-era editions of the novel: is the "Oriental Press, Shanghai, 1921" text that Waley names the Yadong Library 亞東圖書館 edition, and did his copy carry Hu Shih's 1923 essay or only the 1921 preface?

34.22° N, 108.96° E · Big Wild Goose Pagoda · Xi'an