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35-690: Anthony Yu translated the name simply as "The Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod," while W.J.F. Jenner translates it as the "As-You-Will Gold-Banded Cudgel." The staff first appears in the third chapter when the Monkey King goes to the underwater kingdom of Ao Guang ( Chinese : 敖廣 ), the Dragon King of the East Sea , looking for a magic weapon to match his strength and skill. When all of the traditional magic weapons—swords, spears, and halberds weighing thousands of pounds each—fail to meet his standards,

70-706: A club, showing that the predecessor of the Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod has more magical abilities. A weapon that predates the Compliant Rod from the Ming version is mentioned in passing early on in the tale. Monkey mentions that the Queen Mother of the West had flogged him with an "Iron Cudgel" (鐵棒) on his left and right sides for stealing 10 peaches from her heavenly garden. He later borrows

105-459: A needle and keeps it tucked inside his ear. The oldest edition of Journey to the West , the 13th-century Kōzanji Version (高山寺) published during the late Song dynasty , diverges in many points from the final version published during the Ming . For instance, the episode where Monkey acquires the staff is completely different, as is the staff itself. Sun takes the monk Tang Sanzang to heaven to meet

140-534: A new complexity in structure and sophistication in language that helped to establish the novel as a respected form among later popular audiences and erudite critics. The Chinese historian and literary theorist C. T. Hsia wrote in 1968 that these six works "remain the most beloved novels among the Chinese." During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese novels inspired sequels, rebuttals, and reinventions with new settings, sometimes in different genres. Far more than in

175-594: A new legitimacy. These novels were written in a mixture of vernacular and classical Chinese, though some were more completely vernacular. For instance, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is known for its mix of classical prose with folklore and popular narratives, while the Dream of the Red Chamber is known for the use of poetry within its mostly vernacular style. These novels popularized and legitimatized

210-407: Is initially described as a pillar of black iron twenty feet in height and the width of a barrel. It is only when Monkey lifts it and suggests that a smaller size would be more manageable that the staff complies with his wishes and shrinks. After this, it is only a little taller than him, and as thick as a rice bowl. This is when Sun sees that the weapon is banded with a gold ring on each end, as well as

245-406: Is the clearest and most sophisticated example: the action is sometimes grossly sexual, but in the end emphasizes conventional morality. These novels influenced the development of vernacular fiction in later Chinese literary history . Traditionally, fiction and drama were not held in high regard in the Chinese and East Asian literary culture, and they were generally not seen as true "literature" by

280-625: Is the first to show strong signs of a single author who composed all or most of the text, which became more common in later novels. In the late Ming and early Qing, new commercial publishing houses found it profitable to issue novels that claimed specific authors and authentic texts. They commissioned scholars to edit texts and supply commentaries to interpret them. Mao Zonggang , for instance, and his father Mao Lun, edited Three Kingdoms and Jin Shengtan edited Water Margin , supplying an introduction to which he signed Shi Nai'an's name. In each case

315-639: The University of Chicago (Ph.D.). Among his honors and awards are elected membership in the American Council of Learned Societies and Academia Sinica , as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship and Mellon Foundation grant. He died of heart failure in 2015. Four Great Classical Novels Classic Chinese Novels ( traditional Chinese : 古典小說 ; simplified Chinese : 古典小说 ; pinyin : gǔdiǎn xiǎoshuō ) are

350-509: The literati who dominated intellectual life. Writers in these forms did not have the same level of prestige as poets or scholars of Chinese classics . The late Ming and early Qing dynasty versions of these novels, however, included commentaries that were printed between the lines, so that the reader saw them as part of the text. These commentaries interpreted the text in often strained ways, but established critical and aesthetic criteria, modeled on those of poetry and painting, that gave fiction

385-585: The mainland to escape the Japanese invasion . There, starting at the age of four, Yu learned classical Chinese from his grandfather, who would tell him stories from Journey to the West and draw Chinese characters in the sand for him to learn. After the war he went with his parents to Taiwan. He went to the United States , where he graduated from Houghton College , then took a bachelor's degree in theology at Fuller Theological Seminary ( S.T.B ) and

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420-527: The 14th to 18th centuries, though a little earlier in China. Chinese audiences were more interested in history and were more historically minded. They appreciated relative optimism, moral humanism, and relative emphasis on collective behavior and the welfare of the society. The rise of a money economy and urbanization under the Song dynasty led to a professionalization of entertainment which was further encouraged by

455-450: The 1610 text, however, was a more coherent and presumably closer to the author's intent. In chronological order of their earliest forms, they are: From early times, Chinese writers preferred history as the genre for telling stories about people, while poetry was preferred for personal expression of emotion. Confucian literati , who dominated cultural life, looked down on other forms as xiao shuo (lit. “little talk” or “minor writings”),

490-533: The European tradition, every level of society was familiar with the plots, characters, key incidents, and quotations. Those who could not read these novels for themselves knew them through tea-house story-tellers, Chinese opera , card games, and new year pictures . In modern times they live on through popular literature, graphic novels, cartoons and films, television drama, video games, and theme parks. The literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks writes that

525-607: The Golden Vase until 1957 and in 1985 ). Since the early 1980s, they have been known in mainland China as the Four Great Classical Novels . None of the six were published in the author's lifetime. Three Kingdoms and Water Margin appeared in many variants and forms long before being edited in their classic form in the late Ming. There is considerable debate on their authorship. Since the novel, unlike poetry or painting, had little prestige, authorship

560-521: The Golden Vase was banned for most of its existence. Despite this, Lu Xun , like many if not most scholars and writers, place it among the top Chinese novels. After the Communist takeover in China, the official People's Literature Publishing House successively republished the collated editions of Water Margin , Romance of the Three Kingdoms , Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West between 1952 and 1954 (It would not republish The Plum in

595-575: The Ming and Qing dynasties represented a pinnacle of classic Chinese fiction. Until World War II, the dominant sinological scholarship considered all fiction popular and therefore directly reflective of the creative imagination of the masses. C. T. Hsia, however, established the role of the scholar-literati in the creation of vernacular fiction, though not denying the popular subject matter of some texts. Scholars then examined traditional fiction for sophisticated techniques. The American literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks argues that Romance of

630-500: The Three Kingdoms , Water Margin , Journey to the West as well as Jin Ping Mei (not considered one of the four classic novels but discussed by him as one of the four masterworks of the Ming dynasty) collectively constituted a technical breakthrough reflecting new cultural values and intellectual concerns. Their educated editors, authors, and commentators used the narrative conventions developed from earlier storytellers , such as

665-426: The best-known works of literary fiction across pre-modern Chinese literature . The group usually includes the following works: Ming dynasty novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms , Water Margin , Journey to the West , and The Plum in the Golden Vase ; and Qing dynasty novels Dream of the Red Chamber and The Scholars . These works are among the world's longest and oldest novels. They represented

700-412: The cudgel to use in tandem with the monk's staff to battle 9 dragons. The rings on the latter may have influenced the bands on the former. Anthony Yu Anthony Christopher Yu ( Chinese : 余國藩 ; pinyin : Yú Guófān ; October 6, 1938 – May 12, 2015) was an American literary theorist, sinologist, and theologian. He was a scholar of literature and religion, both East Asian and Western; and

735-480: The dragon queen suggests to her husband that they give Sun a useless iron pillar taking up space in their treasury. She claims that the ancient shaft had started producing heavenly light days prior and suggests that the monkey is fated to own it. The novel never explains how the pillar was made, only that it was originally used by Yu the Great to measure the depths of the world flood during times immemorial. The staff

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770-449: The editor made cuts, additions, and basic alterations to the text, misrepresenting them as restoring the original. They also supplied commentaries with literary and political points that modern scholars sometimes find strained. Their editions, however, became standard for centuries, and most modern translations are based on them. Zhang Zhupo likewise edited The Plum in the Golden Vase . Zhang worked on an abridged and rewritten text of 1695;

805-420: The episodic structure, interspersed songs and folk sayings, or speaking directly to the reader, but they fashioned self-consciously ironic narratives whose seeming familiarity camouflaged a Neo-Confucian moral critique of late Ming decadence. Plaks explores the textual history of the novels (all published after their author's deaths, usually anonymously) and how the ironic and satirical devices of these novels paved

840-591: The fields of religion and comparative literature and is perhaps best known for his four-volume translation of one of China's Four Great Classical Novels Journey to the West into English. Yu was born in Hong Kong on October 6, 1938. His middle initial "C" was only a legal formality, though Yu later took the middle name Christopher. His father, Pak Chuen Yu, a general in the Chinese Nationalist Army , and his mother Norma Sau Chan, then went to

875-403: The inscription along the body reading "The Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod. Weight: thirteen thousand five hundred catties " (如意金箍棒重一萬三千五百斤). The inscription indicates that the staff follows the commands of its owner, shrinking or growing to his whim, make copies of itself, and that it is immensely heavy, weighing 17,550 lbs (7,960 kg). When not in use, Monkey shrinks it down to the size of

910-440: The most important landmarks" of the novels of China. There have been a number of groupings. Romance of the Three Kingdoms , Journey to the West , Water Margin and The Plum in the Golden Vase were grouped by publishers in the early Qing and promoted as Four Masterworks ( Chinese : 四大奇書 ; pinyin : Sìdàqíshú ; lit. 'four great masterpieces'). Because of its explicit descriptions of sex, The Plum in

945-405: The role of vernacular literature in literary circles. In the late imperial periods, with the widespread of commercial printing, Chinese novels also became heavily circulated across East and Southeast Asia; it was reported in 1604, several hundreds of titles of Chinese books came through to the port city of Nagasaki alone, and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, estimated over

980-438: The spread of printing, the rise of literacy, and education. In both China and Western Europe, the novel gradually became more autobiographical and serious in exploration of social, moral, and philosophical problems. Chinese fiction of the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty was varied, self-conscious, and experimental. In China, however, there was no counterpart to the 19th-century European explosion of novels. The novels of

1015-478: The supreme god Mahabrahma Deva . After the monk impresses the gods with his lecture on the Lotus Sutra , Monkey is given a golden monk's staff (among other items) as a magical weapon against the evils they will face on their journey to India. Sun later uses the staff in a battle with a white-clad woman who transforms into a tiger demon. He changes the staff into a titanic red-haired, blue-skinned Yaksha with

1050-433: The surface meanings of the story. Three Kingdoms , he argues, presents a contrast between the ideal—that is, dynastic order—and the reality of political collapse and near-anarchy; Water Margin likewise presents heroic stories from the popular tradition in a way that exposes the heroism as brutal and selfish; Journey to the West is an outwardly serious spiritual quest undercut by comic and sometimes bawdy tone. Jin Ping Mei

1085-572: The term " classic novels " in reference to these six titles is a "neologism of twentieth-century scholarship" that seems to have come into common use under the influence of C. T. Hsia's The Classic Chinese Novel . He adds that he is not sure at what point in the Qing or early twentieth century this became a "fixed critical category", but the grouping appears in a wide range of critical writing. Paul Ropp notes that "an almost universal consensus affirms six works as truly great". Hsia views them as "historically

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1120-672: The term that in later times came to be used for fiction. Early examples of narrative classics include Bowuzhi , A New Account of the Tales of the World , Soushen Ji , Wenyuan Yinghua , Great Tang Records on the Western Regions , Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang , Taiping Guangji and Yijian Zhi . The novel as an extended prose narrative that realistically creates a believable world evolved in China and in Europe from

1155-469: The way for the great novels of the 18th century. Plaks further shows these Ming novels share formal characteristics. They almost all contain more than 100 chapters; are divided into ten-chapter narrative blocks, each broken into two- to three-chapter episodes; are arranged in symmetrical halves; and arrange their events in patterns that follow seasons and geography. They manipulated the conventions of popular storytelling in an ironic way in order to go against

1190-404: Was of little interest in any case. While tradition attributes Water Margin to Shi Nai'an , there is little or no reliable information on him or even confidence that he existed. The novel, or portions of it, may have been written by Luo Guanzhong , perhaps Shi's student, who was the reputed author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms , or by Shi Hui ( 施惠 ) or Guo Xun ( 郭勛 ). Journey to the West

1225-786: Was the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of Religion and Literature in the Chicago Divinity School ; as well as a member of the Departments of Comparative Literature , East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and English Language and Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago . Yu has published widely in

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