Tower of Myriad Mirrors: A Supplement to Journey to the West (Michigan Classics in Chinese Studies) Read Free Page A

almost mechanical manner. This makes sense in the context of Journey to the West , whose intention is to show Monkey's submission—the submission of the self-inflated will—to the discipline that alone can lead to salvation. That is, going to visit Buddha presents no problem to one with Monkey's powers, but being bound to accompany a bumbling priest on an overland route beset with frustrations is an allegorical environment wherein Monkey can acquire self-control and self-consciousness.
     
    This process remains unarticulated in the novel itself, which shows no change in Monkey's character, even after he has been awarded buddhahood. The interest in him as a fantastic hero and in the invention of monsters for him to fight wins out over subtlety in characterization, and we are left to believe that Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey becomes a buddha simply because he has completed a physical quest.
     
    Finding this conclusion inadequate, Tung Yüeh decided to patch Journey to the West with a sequence probing the internal workings of Monkey's mind. He chose for his vehicle a hallucinatory world evoked by the demon of desire, called Ch'ing Fish, which is a purely yin force proportionate to Monkey's inherent yang. Following from this, a sense of antithesis informs the major imagery of The Tower of Myriad Mirrors . From the Land of Flaming Mountain, where everything is red and unaffected by the change of seasons, the pilgrims have “come again to the land of green spring.” But an echo of the former redness, the peony tree, signals Monkey's absorption into dream, and events that fly in the face of what he recognizes as reality soon begin to occur.
     
    Reversals of reality are concretized in the many mirrors of the Tower. Monkey enters one mirror and becomes Beautiful Lady Yü, his sexual opposite. The orderly perception of time is eroded by the discovery of three coexisting levels of time beyond the normal: a World of the Ancients, a World of the Future, and a World of Oblivion. When Monkey presides in the World of the Future, he reads a calendar that runs backward from the end of the month to the beginning. And opposition becomes oxymoron when he meets the New Ancient, the original time-traveler who helps Monkey back into the Tower.
     
    From a Buddhist point of view, all this is necessary to undercut Monkey's assumption that the information provided by his senses can be trusted with the degree of confidence he exuded during the earlier part of the pilgrimage. The Tower of Myriad Mirrors stands as the central image in this process, a key to multiple planes of existence beyond Monkey's imagination. As such, it has a parallel in the Avatamsaka Sutra . There the Bodhisattva Maitreya creates for one Sudhana a spiritual aid, a tower that holds a self-contained cosmos. Within the tower are arrayed countless similar towers, each with its own cosmos and each of those with a Maitreya and a Sudhana. Sudhana sees all time in one glance and is enlightened.
     
    When Monkey attempts to leave the Tower, he becomes enmeshed in red threads—recalling once again the Flaming Mountain—but is extricated by an old man who snaps the threads one by one. This is a turning point because the old man is Monkey himself, and he has therefore effected a meeting between the deluded, pre-enlightened self and that deeper self, which by the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism is always enlightened. After Monkey leaves the Tower he is, like his counterpart Sudhana, on the way to spiritual awakening.
     
    From the standpoint of both Buddhist and modern dream psychology, the Tower segment may be said to take place in the depths of the unconscious, to represent a fundamental reordering of Monkey's psyche carried out in a setting complementary to waking life. It leaves unresolved, however, the disorders of his unconscious accumulated at the Flaming Mountain—namely, the sexual desire implied by Monkey's penetration of Lady Rakshas' body and his penchant for relying on his physical