The first episode of The Cosmic Library’s new season, “The Hall of the Monkey King,” is out now, thanks to Lit Hub and our guests. This season follows tangents prompted by Journey to the West, the comic epic about the Monkey King, the monk Tripitaka, and others on a quest for sacred Buddhist texts.
Here’s the very funny and action-packed translation I’m reading—and the translator, Julia Lovell, is on every episode this season:
These newsletters will often include transcript quotes and passages related to previous seasons, but while the Monkey King shows are coming out, I’m going to focus on Journey to the West, mostly.
I’ll start with a scene from Julia Lovell’s translation. It’s a scene of confrontation between the Monkey King and spirit generals from Heaven who come to face the trickster (and his army of monkeys) after he’s stolen immortal peaches and destroyed the heavenly Peach Festival. You get a sense here of the Monkey King’s arrogance, his mischievous use of the forms and tones of spiritual loftiness, and the trouble heading his way.
The panicked monkeys rushed into the cave to report the uninvited guests: “Calamity, Great Sage! Nine fierce gods are outside saying they’ve come to subdue you.”
Just then, Monkey was enjoying a few cups of heavenly wine with seventy-six of his closest friends. He seemed perfectly unfazed by the news of what was going on outside. “Drink your wine while it’s warm,” he proverbialized. “Never mind the brewing storm.”
But the spiritual, bureaucratic order does land on the Monkey King, and his own pursuit of immortality happens by navigating that bureaucracy. Julia Lovell says in this episode:
An important idea here is that the worlds beyond this world, heaven and hell, will look pretty much exactly like the mortal world, and especially like the mortal world as governed by the Chinese imperial civil service. In Journey to the West, the arbiters of heaven and hell, of life and death, bear a pretty precise resemblance to earthly Chinese bureaucrats. So, for example, there has to be a permit issued by the proper heavenly department before the river or sea dragons will release rain, and the exact amount is always specified down to the last drop. The novel presents a view of spirituality, of heaven, and the afterlife in which entities like heaven exactly resemble the bureaucratic structures of Chinese earthly government. So the novel showcases this amusingly revealing idea: if you become an immortal and go to heaven, what could be more heavenly than becoming a civil servant?
More is on the way! Next week!
-Adam