4.1 The Hall of the Monkey King: Introduction

The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It’s the story of a monk’s journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests include troublemaking and the pursuit of immortality.

In film, television, comic books, videogames, and elsewhere, this book remains in pop culture; for example, its story is woven into the new Disney+ streaming series American Born Chinese (based on a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang). And it’s also the right book to include on The Cosmic Library shelf alongside Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, and the Hebrew Bible—it’s full of transformations, dream-like scenes, and surprising complications. 

This season, we’ll hear readings from the book and talk about Buddhism, Daoism, cinema, comedy, and more. There’s a lot here. Journey to the West continually jolts the reader toward some joke, spiritual consideration, or satirical deflation of such considerations. Gene Luen Yang has described, in his foreword to Julia Lovell’s recent translation of Journey to the West, how tales of the Monkey King worked in his childhood as bedtime stories. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you’ll hear how it’s the kind of book to read into the night, into the dream-like realm where categories blur, where thoughts and moods shift continually. 

Guests this season will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston— she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard.

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