Allegory and “World” Formation inThe Journey to the West

Abstract

Before measuring the standing of The Journey to the West in world literature, one has to inquire what the “world” stands for in the sixteenth‐century Chinese novel. Ideologically, the novel seems to construct a closed system of a Daoist allegory, which renders a historical Buddhist monk's pilgrimage to fetch the holy scriptures from India into an imaginative journey across the inner landscape in pursuit of immortality – a landscape that is at once inside the body and cosmological. The closed system starts to crack once we see that the mapping of this micro‐ and macro‐cosmos is never coherent and consistent within the story itself and throughout the history of its interpretations. The otherwise self‐contained Chinese religious allegory thus opens up to the world of historical contingency.