The return from the west : A humanist tale

chapter Four

Chapter 98 : Journey to the West

She turned to Chapter 98 and continued reading, moving slowly between the main text and the commentaries in the margin. This had always been her favourite part of the book the ending chapters, where the journey becomes strange, symbolic, and unexpectedly human. She had been fascinated with this ancient Chinese literature for as long as she could remember.


During her evening duties at National University Hospital, she would sneak into one of the private rooms whenever she had a few minutes to spare, just to catch the serial on TV. That was where the Monkey King first caught her attention wild, stubborn, brilliant, flawed and where she began to appreciate the gentle, complicated relationship between Sun Wukong and Tripitaka. Later, she watched the children’s version with her daughter.


Every evening, mother and daughter sat together in front of the TV, sharing the story as if it were a ritual. Her daughter loved the serials as much as she did. But one scene stayed with her forever: The moment when the Monkey King’s girlfriend cried and pleaded with him to repent to say sorry to Guan Yin while he was imprisoned beneath the mountain. She remembered glancing at her daughter and seeing tears quietly roll down her little girl’s face. Something in that scene had touched her deeply.

And she wondered, even till today, what went through her daughter’s mind at that moment. What did a child see in that sorrow? What did she understand?

These memories stayed with her, shaping her affection for the story. She had read Journey to the West and its commentaries not once, but more than twice each time discovering a different meaning, a different symbolism, a different echo of her own life.

And now, once again, she arrived at Chapter 98. One thing that always struck her was the complicated relationship between Sun Wukong and Tripitaka. Both had a duty to perform one from the intellectual and spiritual realm, the other from the realm of discipline and force.

Two different natures, two different temperaments, yet one shared goal: to bring the scriptures back. Tripitaka’s role was not just to obtain the scriptures, but also to protect the pilgrim band including the very warrior who protected him. Sun Wukong’s role was to defend the priest at all costs. Their conflict was almost inevitable.

They clashed many times. They disagreed openly. At one point, Tripitaka was so furious with Sun Wukong that he banished him, ordering him to leave. And the Monkey King obeyed the command but he didn’t go far. He stayed close, following them from a distance, watching over them, making sure no danger reached them.

And when the pilgrims eventually fell into trouble, it was Sun Wukong who returned to rescue them. That was when Tripitaka realised that he needed Sun Wukong just as much as Sun Wukong needed them.
For Sun Wukong, his devotion was not rooted in emotion it was rooted in vow. He had pledged to protect. And no matter what happened, he could not abandon that vow. To do so would undermine his very being.

This interplay conflict, loyalty, misunderstanding, and mutual dependence is one of the things that made the story so rich for her. It wasn’t just about demons and magic. It was about relationships, roles, and the discipline of duty. What fascinated her even more was the literature itself the way the author took something historically simple and turned it into something unforgettable.

She was aware that historically, monks had indeed been sent to India not one, but several to bring Buddhist scriptures back to China. It was a long, difficult journey, but in its raw form, the historical record is actually quite dry. A travel log. A list of hardships. Dust. Sand. Names of kingdoms. Nothing very dramatic. But what the author of Journey to the West did was extraordinary. He took this small historical fact and infused it with imagination demons, spirits, talking animals, divine interventions, magical transformations.

Suddenly, the dry journey became colourful, vibrant, alive. He created figures like the Monkey King, Pigsy, and Sandy, and wove them into the narrative in such a down-to-earth, almost playful way that the entire story stuck in people’s minds for centuries. If he had written only what happened, no one would remember it. But because he brought the mystical into the mundane the impossible into the ordinary the story became timeless.

Monkey King has always been a popular mystical figure in Chinese folklore long before Journey to the West became a literary classic. He appears in ancient stories, religious texts, Taoist legends, and oral traditions. So when the author placed him in the narrative, he wasn’t inventing something new he was tapping into a figure the people already loved. But the fascination doesn’t stop in China. In Hinduism, the Monkey King mirrors Hanuman, the powerful vanara warrior from the Ramayana.

This connection intrigued her deeply when she first began studying Hinduism. Hanuman’s devotion to Rama, his strength, loyalty, and unwavering sense of duty all of it echoed the qualities she admired in Sun Wukong. Some commentaries even suggest that Hanuman is an incarnation of Shiva. She is still trying to understand the logic behind that claim, and how it fits into the tapestry of mythology and belief.

She had witnessed many trance sessions over the years usually the munis, the shaktis, especially the snake goddess. But Hanuman trance? Almost never.

Only once. She had visited a Vaishnavite friend, and during the visit, the friend’s sister suddenly went into trance adopting unmistakably monkey-like postures. It happened so fast. She watched, trying her best to remain calm and rational, as the sister went into the prayer room, picked up several limes, and handed them to her as if they carried some silent instruction.

She stood there, clutching the limes, completely bewildered. After the visit, she turned to her boyfriend and asked, “What am I supposed to do with these lemons?”

He replied with total confidence: “You cut, squeeze into a pail, and bathe with it.” And she went into a long, dramatic

“Ooooooohhhhhh…” She held the limes, completely puzzled.

Bathe with it? But why waste? These are vitamins. In her mind she was already thinking: better to squeeze them, make lemon juice, and drink it.


It was a small moment, ridiculous even but later, as she turned back to the pages of Journey to the West, these thoughts came to mind…The entire Journey to the West was about metamorphosis. Not the obvious transformations demons changing form, Wukong’s seventy-two shapeshifts but the deeper ones. The slow, painful evolution of character, consciousness, and destiny.

Buddhism speaks of transforming the mind. Taoism speaks of transforming energy. Confucianism speaks of transforming virtue. The novel weaves all three into a single long metamorphosis. Every trial, every quarrel, every fear, every mistake is part of that process.

And suddenly she understood why, in Chapter 98, only Tripitaka falls into the river. Only the monk had not metamorphosed. The disciples spiritual beings in exile had already shed their old forms. But Tripitaka was still fully human, still bound to flesh and fear. His fall into the river was the final initiation the shedding of the mortal shell.

The corpse floating away was not tragedy it was instruction. A reminder that the old self must leave completely for the new self to emerge. And as she reflected on this, she remembered a conversation she once had with the third person about Buddhi Suddhi.

About the moment in tantric practice when one visualises their own corpse burning on the funeral pyre, allowing the ego to dissolve, the past to fall away, and the new being to rise from the ashes. The monk shed his mortal body in the river. She, too, had been taught to watch her own symbolic corpse burn.

Different traditions, different imagery but the same truth: To become, something must first die. And sometimes, that death is not in the river or the fire, but in the silent shift of understanding the moment you finally see what was always there.

And then there were the blank scriptures. The monk accepted them without checking. Blind faith, unquestioning obedience emptiness in the wrong way. But in Buddhist philosophy, emptiness (śūnyatā) is not nothingness. It is the space from which wisdom arises.

A scripture is empty unless the seeker awakens understanding within. Tripitaka received blank pages because he had not yet learned to see. Only when an invisible hand lifted the corner did he realise the truth. Words alone cannot liberate. Wisdom must be realised. Emptiness is the beginning of insight She were told that the Monkey King and Hanuman were not the same being.

Different stories, different cosmologies, different worlds. And yet the thought lingered: Why does a monkey-like character become central to Journey to the West? Why a monkey at all? Then it dawned on her. The monkey is the perfect symbol for the unruly mind clever, restless, impulsive, brilliant, uncontrollable. In both Eastern and Southeast Asian traditions, the “monkey mind” represents the part of us that leaps, rebels, argues, fights, and refuses to sit still.

And in many spiritual practices, the greatest struggle is not with demons outside, but with this inner creature that resists discipline. Sun Wukong is not just a character. He is the mind in chaos, the ego in rebellion, the wild genius that must be trained, tamed, disciplined, and eventually transformed.

His strength becomes protection only after training. His cleverness becomes wisdom only after surrender. His vow becomes pure only after humility. He becomes central to the journey because no spiritual pilgrimage is possible without confronting and transforming the monkey within.