Spiritual Clarity and Satirical Play: On the Monkey King as Allegory

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all this for the sake of ultimate, anarchic satire, for a livelier spirituality, or for other reasons: that all gets debated. Julia Lovell says in this episode:

Literary critics have been arguing about the spiritual, religious elements of the book for centuries. Some have always maintained that the book has actually a very intricate religious design, that Monkey is an allegory for the human mind. So in this reading, Monkey stands for the instability of human genius in need of discipline, namely the trials of the pilgrimage, to realize its potential for good.

There’s justification for such a reading, even if it’s not the only possible interpretation of this book. Lovell says:

The earliest Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese analogize the human mind as a monkey, as restless, erratic, volatile. And by the end of the first millennium C.E., the phrase “monkey of the mind” (xinyuan) had become a stock literary allusion for this restless human mind.

Following the Monkey King’s successful scenes of mischief, you might interpret the book as a joyous celebration of that Monkey Mind; or, the difficulties and disciplinary experiences that change the Monkey King could make the novel seem like a spiritually exacting pilgrim’s quest. There’s no single answer here. You’ll have to choose your own adventure.

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