The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 2 (101 page)

4
. Roaring Mountain: a Hao Shan
can be found in “Xici sijing
,” in
Classic of Mountain and Sea
,
j
2. See
Shanhaijing jiaozhu
, p. 60; Mathieu, 1:119.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

1
. This is another lyric written to the tune of “Moon Over West River.”

2
. See JW 1, chapters 3 and 4.

3
. Child Sudhana: Shancai tongzi
, the Boy Skilled in Wealth, so named because all kinds of rare jewels and treasures appeared with him at the time of his birth. In Buddhist iconography, he and the Girl Skilled in Wealth (Shancai tongnü) are often
seen
as the attendants of the Bodhisattva Guanyin (see
chapter 42
). For the accounts of Sudhana, see the
Huayan jing
, the
Avata
ṁ
saka sütra
, of which there are three major translations in the history of Chinese Buddhism. The last section of this lengthy scripture is named “Entry into the Realm of Reality” or
Ru fajie pin
, the bulk of which is devoted to the story of Sudhana’s quest for enlightenment. In this episode of the novel, however, the XYJ author is saying that the Child Sudhana prior to his submission to Buddhism was the demon, Red Boy, though this particular line of the poem already anticipates his conversion and elevation. For a convenient modern critical edition with annotations of the
Ru fajie pin
, see
Xinyi Yuayan Ru Fajie pin
, translated and annotated by Yang Wenzhong
, 2 vols. (Taipei, 2004). For an English translation of the sūtra itself, see Thomas Cleary,
The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra
, 3 vols. (Boulder, 1984–1987). For an illuminating study of Huayan Buddhism’s contribution to Chinese fiction, specifically to the novel XYJ, see Qiancheng Li,
Fictions of Enlightenment
, pp. 21–48, 49–89.

4
. Suiren:
, the mythological figure who invented fire in China by drilling wood.

5
. Samādhi fire: see JW 1, chapter 7, n. 3. For further explanation of the term in Daoism, see entry on “Sanmei zhenhuo
,” in ZHDJDCD, p. 1191.

6
. Liver’s wood: as has been rehearsed in our introduction in JW 1, when we discussed the preface to the 1592 edition of the novel, the five viscera (heart, liver, spleen, lung, and kidney) are often correlated with the Five Phases in the discourse of internal alchemy and traditional Chinese medicine. This correlation indicates that the phasal energetics of fire, for example, is resident in the liver, that of earth in the spleen, and so on. What the poem seems to express in these lines here is the “productive sequence [i.e.,
xiangsheng
]” of the Five Phases, in which every Evolutive Phase, in the words of Manfred Porkert, p. 51, is “conceived as the product or ‘child’ (
tzǔ
) of the precedent E.P., which in turn is considered its ‘mother’ (
mu
).”