The food is all but the dee, it's always fried noodles that the demons are tempting pigsy. The bureau of rice reincarnation is a long, sort of elaborate sort of gag about toilets. And these bureaucrats are often lazy, venal, just simply in potent. That seems to me to be one of the concerns of ming. Tuno: Is there a consistent moral in the story? What is there moral? And if so, what is it?
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China’s Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially the addition of a monkey as companion who, in the novel, becomes supersimian. For most readers the monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by this irrepressible Monkey with his extraordinary powers, accompanied by the fallen but recovering deities, Pigsy and Sandy.
The image above, from the caricature series Yoshitoshi ryakuga or Sketches by Yoshitoshi, is of Monkey creating an army by plucking out his fur and blowing it into the air, and each hair becomes a monkey-warrior.
With
Julia Lovell
Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu
Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
And
Craig Clunas
Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson