Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun

      The Monkey King tells the epic story of a monkey, a pig and a novice accompanying a monk to India to seek sutras, sacred writings. The monk is utterly useless. He is kind and pious, but weak, bumbling and, as the Chinese say, with a mind as narrow as a chicken’s intestine. He cannot tell right from wrong. But it is reputed that eating his flesh will guarantee immortality, so demons and vampires are all out to get him. He is in luck though: soon after he sets off, he runs into the monkey, sent to help him by the Goddess of Compassion. Without the monkey, he would not stand a chance of saving his skin, let alone getting his job done. The monkey looks like any other, but he is far from ordinary. His eyes are the sun and the moon. He appeases his hunger with iron-pills and slakes his thirst with copper-juice. In one somersault he covers 180,000 leagues. Reciting a spell, he can turn himself into anything he desires: a cloud shrouding everything in darkness, an insect hidden in a peach, a giant so big that even hurricanes cannot blow him away. No weapon can harm him, and a contingent of 100,000 heavenly troops fails to catch him. Even alchemical fire cannot burn him. He is inviolable and he gives himself a fitting title – ‘The Great Sage, Equal to Heaven’. He is submissive only to the Buddha and the monk – whenever the monk recites a spell from a sutra, the monkey curls up and cries with unbearable pain. After eighty-one titanic battles the monkey finally finds the sutras and brings them back with the monk on a magic wind. The monk, the monkey, the pig and the novice all became Buddhas.

      I showed the book to my father when he came back from work. ‘It is a good book,’ he said. ‘Chairman Mao loves it. He even wrote a poem about it: “The monk is confused but can be reformed; the vampire is vicious and must be killed. The golden monkey strikes with his cudgel, and Heaven is cleared of all evil. Welcome, welcome, Monkey King, for the battle against new demons.” ’

      ‘What are the sutras? Why did the monkey go all that way to get them? Are they like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book?’ I asked. I had heard adults use the word ‘sutra’ to describe the latest instruction from Chairman Mao.

      ‘Sutras are the words of the Buddha,’ my father told me.

      ‘Who is the Buddha? Is he like Chairman Mao, very important?’

      Father was suddenly very irritated. ‘These are not things for children. You cannot understand them. And you mustn’t talk about them outside this house.’

      Many Red Guards took Mao’s poem as their cue and called their factions ‘The Magic Cudgel’ or ‘The Golden Monkey’. Little did I know that they created more havoc and unleashed more terror than the monkey could have done.

      As it went on, the Cultural Revolution became ever more extreme. There was no more singing and dancing, no parading. It progressed to blows, bloody noses and bruised eyes; from debates to vituperation and violence. I often ran home, scared. Then barricades began to appear in the streets, and rifles and cannons. I was no longer allowed out of the house, which was almost like a fortress, with sandbags at the door and all the windows boarded up. Only my father could sneak off in his officer’s uniform and buy groceries. At night we huddled together in the dark, listening to the gunshots snapping like fireworks. Grandmother was confused. ‘Are the Japanese invading us again?’ she asked my father. ‘Why are people killing each other?’ He did not answer. It was no circus any more.

      I retreated to my book. I still remember reading The Monkey King for the first time. It was sheer magic: every step of the way was an adventure, replete with hordes of gods and goddesses, fairies and spirits, humans and demons. I felt transported to another world where nothing was impossible.

      But I felt irritated too. I could not see why the monkey wanted to protect a hopeless, feeble monk. He had to go through ‘mountains of knives and seas of flame’ to find the sutras. What were they for? Why did he not just forget about them? Besides, how could the powerless monk have control over the almighty monkey simply by reciting a spell? Who was the Buddha anyway?

      In the evening, I raised these questions with Grandmother. She hesitated, but I insisted. She asked me to close the door. ‘Sutras are very important. That’s why the monk risked his life getting them.’

      ‘But the monkey found them for him, really,’ I protested.

      ‘That is the story. In real life, the monk went on his own,’ Grandmother said quietly.

      ‘How do you know so much?’ I asked Grandmother.

      ‘Oh, a monk in our temple in the village was a great fan of Master Xuanzang. He told us a lot about him.’

      ‘It isn’t possible. Devils were waiting for him every step of the way. He would have been dead a hundred times over. He was so useless.’

      While Grandmother was explaining to me what the monk really did, I felt my eyes were closing. I slept, and dreamed I was very thirsty, as if I were struggling in the desert and could not find the way. For a long time afterwards, I saw the monkey and the monk in my dreams.

      They remained vividly in my memory. But it was no more than that until many years later, when I met an Indian history student in my college’s common room in Oxford.

      ‘I know about someone from China.’

      ‘You have friends there?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Do you mean Mao?’

      He shook his head. There was a look of disappointment on his face, as if it was obvious and I ought to know. He straightened up, and put down his drink. ‘It is Xuanzang. You must know about him.’

      ‘Of course, he is the monk in The Monkey King. It’s one of the most popular Chinese novels,’ I explained.

      ‘He is India’s great friend. We love him. He was an extraordinary man. He preserved a large part of our history for us.’

      I must have looked surprised, and I felt embarrassed. ‘I know who you mean,’ I said.

      But I was puzzled. Could this be the same Xuanzang? I dimly remembered from school that Xuanzang had written about his journey, but we were never taught about him, nor did we read his book, The Record of the Western Regions. The next day I went to the Bodleian Library to see if I could find it. It was there, of course, and also The Life of Xuanzang, the biography written by his disciple, Hui Li, both in English. I sat down at once in the Upper Reading Room and began to read.

      I became completely absorbed. For the next three days I hardly did anything else. I felt I was on a treasure hunt, each page its own reward, but giving me a clue to the next discovery. I could not believe the wealth of information contained in the two books. The sheer number of cities and towns he visited, the history and legends associated with each place, the kings who ruled with righteousness, the Buddhist masters and their luminous wisdom – his Record is an encyclopaedia of the history and culture of the time; it is the testimony to a lost world. I wondered how much of it remained to be rediscovered.

      The Record gives you no impression of Xuanzang himself nor of his adventures on the journey; those you find in the biography. It was a total revelation. Xuanzang was lost in the desert for four days without water. He was robbed many times – once pirates even threatened to throw him into the river as a sacrifice to the river goddess. He was almost killed by an avalanche in the Heavenly Mountains. At one point he even had to go on hunger strike to be allowed to continue his journey. The monk whose biography I was reading bore no relation to the one I had known from childhood. In fact, he was the very opposite of the helpless man in The Monkey King. He embodied determination, perseverance and wisdom. They were both monks, and both went to India in search of sutras – but there the resemblance ended.

      Grandmother was right after all. There was a real Xuanzang. He was born into a scholarly Confucian family in 600 AD, in Henan Province, the cradle of Chinese civilization. He was the youngest of four sons and lost his parents when he was an infant. A serious child, he did not want to play with other children; even at festival times he stayed in and read. He soon became fascinated by monastic life – one of his brothers was initiated as a monk early in his life, and Xuanzang often went to stay with him in his monastery.