Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West (Michigan Classics in Chinese Studies) (2 page)

After its publication in 1596,
Journey to the West
was admired for both its story and its allegories of Buddhist and Taoist teachings. Tung Yüeh found in chapters fifty-nine through sixty-one an incident that inspired him to expand the original's scope in both aspects. In that episode, the pilgrims come to a very hot land where everything is scorched red. They are told that a flaming mountain, from which the area derives its name, changed the climate to eternal broiling summer. Monkey learns that Lady Rakshas possesses a Banana-leaf Fan capable of blowing out the flames and goes to her cave to ask for it. But because Monkey and Kuan-yin had earlier defeated her son, the Red Boy, Monkey instead must face the fan in battle. He loses the first round and is blown thousands of miles away—right to the abode of a bodhisattva from whom he receives a wind-resistant staff and heaviness pills. Now able to withstand Lady Rakshas' assaults, he forces her into her cave, then changes into an insect and enters her belly. There he rampages until she is tortured into surrendering the fan. When he attempts to put out the flaming mountain, however, the flames only leap higher, and the local tutelary deity informs him he has been deceived by a fake fan. What's more, he learns that it was he himself who started the fire when he tipped over the Eight Trigram Cauldron some five hundred years earlier.

Monkey decides to use his sworn brotherhood with the Demon Bull King, Lady Rakshas' estranged husband, to capture the real fan. As before, though, he confronts an adversary incensed over the Red Boy matter. They fight until the Bull King retires from the field. Monkey assumes the Bull King's form, steals his chariot, and calls on Lady Rakshas. Hoping to lure her “husband” away from his mistress and back home for good, she brings out wine and attempts to seduce him. Monkey plays along to the extent of drinking with her, then turns the conversation to the fan and suggests she give it to him for safekeeping. Once he has it, he returns to his own form and leaves. The Demon Bull King, realizing what has happened, changes into Pigsy and tricks Monkey into giving back the fan. But he cannot fan Monkey away, due to the heaviness pills, and the fight is on again. It rages until Monkey and the real Pigsy smash into Lady Rakshas' cave.

The Bull King tries to flee but finds himself cut off in all directions by Buddhist and Taoist deities; he is finally led away with a rope through his nose. The story ends well: The fire is put out and the proper ordering
of the seasons returns to the land; the Bull King is led back to the Buddha land, and a reformed Lady Rakshas asks that the fan be returned to her. This Monkey does reluctantly, and the pilgrimage continues westward.

Interpretations of
THE TOWER OF MYRIAD MIRRORS

The flaming mountain story typifies Wu Ch'eng-en's method of handling obstacles encountered on the pilgrimage. A crisis occurs, Hsüan-tsang is helpless, and so Monkey takes over and battles whatever monster is responsible, until, often with divine aid, the fight is won. Thus, as Tung Yüeh's “Answers to Questions” preface (see
Appendix
) states, Monkey's first recourse is always his superior power. He deals only with the external surface of each situation, and in an almost mechanical manner. This makes sense in the context of
Journey to the West
, whose intention is to show Monkey's submission—the submission of the self-inflated will—to the discipline that alone can lead to salvation. That is, going to visit Buddha presents no problem to one with Monkey's powers, but being bound to accompany a bumbling priest on an overland route beset with frustrations is an allegorical environment wherein Monkey can acquire self-control and self-consciousness.

This process remains unarticulated in the novel itself, which shows no change in Monkey's character, even after he has been awarded buddhahood. The interest in him as a fantastic hero and in the invention of monsters for him to fight wins out over subtlety in characterization, and we are left to believe that Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey becomes a buddha simply because he has completed a physical quest.

Finding this conclusion inadequate, Tung Yüeh decided to patch
Journey to the West
with a sequence probing the internal workings of Monkey's mind. He chose for his vehicle a hallucinatory world evoked by the demon of desire, called Ch'ing Fish, which is a purely yin force proportionate to Monkey's inherent yang. Following from this, a sense of antithesis informs the major imagery of
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
. From the Land of Flaming Mountain, where everything is red and unaffected by the change of seasons, the pilgrims have “come again to the land of green spring.” But an echo of the former redness, the peony tree, signals Monkey's absorption into dream, and events that fly in the face of what he recognizes as reality soon begin to occur.

Reversals of reality are concretized in the many mirrors of the Tower. Monkey enters one mirror and becomes Beautiful Lady Yü, his sexual opposite. The orderly perception of time is eroded by the discovery of three coexisting levels of time beyond the normal: a World of the Ancients, a World of the Future, and a World of Oblivion. When Monkey presides in the World of the Future, he reads a calendar that runs backward from the end of the month to the beginning. And opposition becomes oxymoron when he meets the New Ancient, the original time-traveler who helps Monkey back into the Tower.

From a Buddhist point of view, all this is necessary to undercut Monkey's assumption that the information provided by his senses can be trusted with the degree of confidence he exuded during the earlier part of the pilgrimage. The Tower of Myriad Mirrors stands as the central image in this process, a key to multiple planes of existence beyond Monkey's imagination. As such, it has a parallel in the
Avatamsaka Sutra
. There the Bodhisattva Maitreya creates for one Sudhana a spiritual aid, a tower that holds a self-contained cosmos. Within the tower are arrayed countless similar towers, each with its own cosmos and each of those with a Maitreya and a Sudhana. Sudhana sees all time in one glance and is enlightened.

When Monkey attempts to leave the Tower, he becomes enmeshed in red threads—recalling once again the Flaming Mountain—but is extricated by an old man who snaps the threads one by one. This is a turning point because the old man is Monkey himself, and he has therefore effected a meeting between the deluded, pre-enlightened self and that deeper self, which by the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism is always enlightened. After Monkey leaves the Tower he is, like his counterpart Sudhana, on the way to spiritual awakening.

From the standpoint of both Buddhist and modern dream psychology, the Tower segment may be said to take place in the depths of the unconscious, to represent a fundamental reordering of Monkey's psyche carried out in a setting complementary to waking life. It leaves unresolved, however, the disorders of his unconscious accumulated at the Flaming Mountain—namely, the sexual desire implied by Monkey's penetration of Lady Rakshas' body and his penchant for relying on his physical strength. These two themes run persistently through
Tower.
Sexual innuendo abounds at a party with the lady Green Pearl, and quite specifically in Monkey's poetic line, “I regret that my heart follows
clouds and rain in flight.” “Clouds and rain” is a timeworn literary euphemism for sex. As Beautiful Lady Yü, Monkey tries to avoid bedding with the warrior Hsiang Yü, but this episode and others recall the scene in
Journey to the West
where Monkey drinks shoulder-to-shoulder with Lady Rakshas. When the enraged Monkey beats a little monkey
¹
who has reported how he met a young girl and got drunk with her, he is plainly punishing himself.

In another projection of the Lady Rakshas “affair,” King P
ramit
explains that he is the son of Monkey and Lady Rakshas, and Monkey becomes aligned against his own offspring in the chaotic Battle of the Banners. As the climax of the novel, this battle is in keeping with Ch'an essentials, which teach that when one's perplexity reaches its highest pitch, psychic energies have become concentrated enough to thrust one into new awareness.

This same battle is the culmination of the recourse-to-strength theme as well, for Monkey again assumes the three-headed, six-armed form he used in his rebellion against Heaven. Monkey likes to rely on massive response, and this is why he looks to weapons like the Mountain-removing Bell and the Banana-leaf Fan rather than working through the subtler nuances of his predicaments. Such devices would make the westward journey easy and allow Monkey to avoid the very trials that give the allegorical pilgrimage its meaning. Ultimately, Monkey is not required to abandon his use of force, but to ensure that it is steered toward attaining Buddhist objectives. The story ends, after all, with his smashing of the Ch'ing Fish demon in its guise of a young acolyte who has offered to follow the pilgrims to the West. His act of striking down the acolyte “without a second thought” is an example of intuitively appropriate action in the Ch'an sense. The Ch'ing Fish is Monkey's mirror image—born at the same time and as evil as Monkey is good—so slaying this demon emancipates Monkey's mind from the grip of illusion. It is a violent act, but as Tung Yüeh notes in his “Answers to Questions” (see
Appendix
), “In killing the demon of desire, one must be prepared to cut it in half with one stroke.”

If a Buddhist reading of
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
seems most consonant with the author's overt design, there is also a school of
interpretation comprised of such modern Chinese critics as Liu Ta-chieh and Han Chüeh, who view the novel as a disguised attack on the alien Manchus and the Chinese who served them. They insist that Ch'ing Fish, the key demon in the story, is meant to call to mind the name of the Manchu dynasty rather than the homophone that means “desire.” Though this reading relies upon the probably erroneous belief that the novel was written in retrospect of the Manchu seizure of China, it suggests noteworthy possibilities for interpretation.

The first name Nurhachi chose for his Manchu dynasty was Later Chin, adopted in 1616. Tung Yüeh may well have had this name in mind when he depicted the interrogation and torture of Ch'in Kuei, a man popularly believed to have sold out the twelfth-century Sung court in favor of the first Chin dynasty, which was, like the Manchu court, of non-Han origin. The Manchus changed their dynastic title to Ch'ing in 1636, so that if the novel were indeed written in 1640, the Ch'ing dynasty might well be imbedded in the Ch'ing Fish. In this light it is significant that a smell that offends Monkey when he meets the New Ancient in Shantung Province comes from the Tartars “right next door.” If the Manchus were still in their homeland, “next door” to the north, then invasion remained at least an ominous prospect, though not an accomplished fact.

There is a sense of urgency in the New Ancient's warning that Monkey's whole body will take on the smell if he remains too long. Abhorrence of the polluting association between Chinese and barbarian is figured in Ch'in Kuei, who says pointedly, “There will be many Ch'in Kueis in the future—even today their number is not small.” Possibly Tung Yüeh meant to challenge the complacency that led the court to underestimate the gravity of the Manchu threat, even on the eve of its destruction.

Because
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
is open to more than one interpretation, we have attempted to be as unambiguous as possible with our translation. It is hoped that the footnotes and the foregoing introduction will provide the Western reader with at least an approximation of the knowledge that a Chinese reader would bring with him to the novel. To this extent we have explained allusions and puns that are not immediately obvious in translation. Certainly, the one great pun that hangs over the entire work is based on characters with the sound
ch'ing
,
which may point simultaneously to desire, the color green, and the Ch'ing dynasty.