The Journey to the West (西游记) is one of the masterworks of classic Chinese fiction. It was written by Wu Cheng‘en (吴承恩) in the 16th century CE. Many of the scholars, both Chinese and Western, who have studied the narrative of this Ming era (1368-1644) novel, have considered it to be an epic of myth and fantasy, heavily laden with allegorical meaning. Most scholars have chosen to interpret the novel by means of an encompassing framework of meaning rooted in the convergence of the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. I propose to look at the Journey’s narrative structure as a heroic adventure or monomyth of the kind proposed by Joseph Campbell, following the insights of Carl Jung on the nature of the collective unconscious. To analyze the component parts of the quest story that forms the bulk of the novel‘s narrative, I shall turn to Vladimir Propp‘s categorization of the functioning of elements of plot and character in his morphology of folktales. I shall also argue that the Journey is not an allegory that serves the beliefs and practices of a number of religions and philosophies, but a specifically Buddhist allegory. The Journey is seen as intentionally composed of symbols, images, and codes that function to project a heroic adventure with a complex pattern of meaning, primarily representing the eternal human struggle for identity and a fully realized existence, that are Buddhist in nature.

This paper is an exploration of the theme of pilgrimage in the following three works: Gan&dotbelow;d&dotbelow;vyuha, Journey to the West and The Life of Marpa the Translator. / Through an examination of the narrative structure of the texts, I derive a pattern which is consistent throughout these three Mahayana works. This pattern is then compared to the Mahayana doctrine of Two Truths, which is shown to be expressed by the literary pilgrimage. Finally, by exploring the ways in which these texts 'work' on the reader---both by seeing the protagonist go through the stages of Buddhist practice and through the reader's interaction with the text---I show how reading these stories can act as a transformative Buddhist practice.

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