Journey to the West - Monkey
Journey to the West Hsi-yu Chi - XiYou Ji
Journey to the West, commonly known to the western readers as Monkey,
is a supernatural novel about a world of of fantastic invention, in which gods and
demons loom large and vie for supremacy. The novel began with a series of oral
and written versions, and eventually attained its most definitive version
written by Wu Ch'eng-en (1500?-1582), a scholar-official in the Yantze
region, and published in 1592.
The story of Journey to the West is divided into three parts:
(1) an early history of the Monkey spirit; (2) pseudo-historical account
of Tripitaka's family and life before his trip to to fetch the sutras
in the Western Heaven; (3)the main story, consisting of 81 dangers and
calamities encountered by Tripitaka and his three animal spirit disciples
- Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy (a fish spirit).