Journey to the West

Journey to the West, the classical Chinese novel traditionally attributed to Wu Cheng'en and first printed around 1592, is the primary text of one of the most widely read works of premodern Chinese literature, a fictionalized account of the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage to India accompanied by the trickster figure Sun Wukong, drawing on and elaborating Buddhist, Daoist and popular religious material. Its strength is that it is the primary novel itself, the correct source for what the text actually narrates rather than a later adaptation or summary. Its limit is that the attribution to Wu Cheng'en is itself not fully settled among scholars of the novel, and as a work of elaborate fiction rather than doctrine, it should be read as a rich source for popular religious imagination in late imperial China rather than as a description of orthodox Buddhist or Daoist teaching.