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No 4 - The 612 Day-Long Odyssey: A Transcription of 'The Journey to the West' in Colonial Korea
The Journey to the West can be counted among the most popular narratives in the world. One of its most widely referenced versions is the Chinese novel Xiyou ji, written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Over the course of its one hundred chapters, this novel tells the story of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, who protects the Buddhist monk Tripitaka during his odyssey from China to the Western Heaven in search of the real Buddhist scriptures. Tripitaka is modelled after Xuanzang (c. 602–664), probably the most famous among the Chinese monks travelling to India ‘in search of the dharma’. The Journey owes its popularity in large part to its innumerable versions, which span varied times, cultures, and forms of media. We recently discovered, in the Deep Rooted Tree Museum (Ppuri Kip’ǔn Namu Pangmulgwan) in Sunch’ǒn in Southwest Korea, a hitherto unnoticed Korean version of The Journey in the form of a manuscript from the late 1920s or early 1930s. Over the course of almost two years, an unknown scribe had copied out a Korean translation of The Journey (Kor.: Sŏyugi) from over 400 newspaper issues and thus in effect produced a multi-volume manuscript. What may have been his motivation?