The Controversy over the Connection Between Journey to the West and Elixir Alchemy

The authorship of Journey to the West is disputed. It is commonly said to have been written by the Perfect Man of Changchun, Qiu Chuji; another line of scholarly research from the Republican era supports Wu Chengen as the author. The book is steeped in elixir-alchemy (dandao) thought.

Ancestral Qiu of the Complete Perfection school was a Shandong native; Journey to the West contains many regional dialects, not limited to one area, and appears to have passed through many hands before being compiled — so the book need not have been written by the Perfect Man of Changchun; later generations mostly confused things. As for Wu Chengen, that is entirely the partisan claim of the likes of Lu Xun and Hu Shi, and the argument based on Jiangsu dialect also fails to hold.

What can be confirmed is that the alchemical lineage in Journey to the West — its system of poems and the like — is of the same system as works like Xingming Guizhi (Essential Purport of Nature and Life) composed in the Wanli era, and is greatly related to Complete Perfection alchemical practice.

Throughout the entire book Journey to the West subtly radiates a rich alchemical cultural connotation — full of mystery yet still popular and accessible. This is what allows Journey to the West to truly be called a marvelous book.

What must be noted is that at the time there were in fact many alchemical scriptures publicly printed and circulated everywhere — not treasured secrets withheld from the public — and there were quite a few people studying alchemy or examining it in depth from all over.

As for the poems in Journey to the West or the understanding of alchemy they display, anyone who merely knows something of the alchemical system — not needing mastery, nor needing to have it fully clear — could equally well have written content to satisfy what Journey to the West required.

So the alchemy-related material in Journey to the West can serve as reference or inspiration, but one should not expect profound content, still less cultivation guidance.

To take a concrete example: the Golden-Hooped Rod fits the description of "gold in water," but Sun Wukong borrowed (or rather robbed) it from the Dragon King's underwater palace. Here the ocean floor can be taken as a metaphor: arriving at the ocean floor to search for a weapon — the process of seeking lead. Then many weapons are offered up, which is the process of not needing lead, matching "when using lead one must seek the true lead." But the more critical "having obtained the true lead, one still discards it" is not embodied — he simply receives the Golden-Hooped Rod directly. The pivotal junctures of cultivation are skipped. If one were to novelize the key stages of cultivation, one should also write how Sun Wukong, through the aid of sun and moon, obtained the golden essence — these are the most crucial contents of cultivation, yet they are lacking throughout. Immediately afterward, when the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas present Sun Wukong with golden armor, if read as cultivation allegory this should employ the image of "five dragons supporting the saint" — yet this too fails to match.

If Journey to the West is regarded as something about elixir-alchemical cultivation, it is undoubtedly fragmentary. But the author was not writing an alchemical scripture in the first place — rather borrowing this and that from alchemy as metaphors woven into a story; it is a novel, so in the details it is inherently not fully consistent with actual cultivation.

In real elixir-alchemical cultivation, not only is it important what each hidden saying ultimately refers to; even knowing what it refers to, the further question is how one then cultivates. These are the pivotal junctures — and these cores will not be laid bare in writing.

Basic structures and stages matter most to beginners, yet they fall far short of what is needed for actual practice. So one should not expect to realize specific cultivation content from within it.

Reading Journey to the West is like playing Need for Speed on a computer; actual elixir-alchemical cultivation is like driving a car in real life — the two differ as heaven and earth.