ABSTRACT
Perhaps no figure from classical Chinese literature has been rescripted as frequently in contemporary Chinese diasporic fiction as the Monkey King, trickster-hero of the folk epic Journey to the West (1592), putatively authored by scholar-official Wu Chengen.1 Wu's story is loosely based on a well-known episode in Chinese history.2 In the early Tang dynasty, a Buddhist monk by the name of Xuanzang (Hsuan Tsang or Tripitaka) undertook a 16-year pilgrimage to India via the Silk Road, and when he returned to the capital of Changan in 645, he brought back with him hundreds of Sanskrit scriptures that eventually formed a core body of texts for the Mahayana tradition in China. Xuanzang was then welcomed with an extravagant homecoming by Emperor Taizong at the eastern capital of Luoyang and quickly became a cultural celebrity. In the monk's textual legacy, alongside his scriptural translations and exegetical commentaries, we may also find his memoirs of the pilgrimage. These memoirs constitute the original Journey to the West, translated into English by Samuel Beal as Si~yu~ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World'(1884).
