scholarly journals From China to the World: The main media pilgrimages of Sun Wukong and Son Gokū

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-50
Author(s):  
Giovanni Ruscica

The ‘Journey to the West’, also translated as the’ Pilgrimage to the West’, is one of the masterpieces of ancient Chinese literature. Published anonymously by the putative author Wu Cheng'en in the late 16th century, the story traces in broad outline the journey taken by the monk Tripitaka in the year 629 a.D. to India to acquire Buddhist scriptures, and it is the result of reworking antecedent works, such as ‘Poetic notes on the pilgrimage of Tripitaka of the Great Tang to acquire the Sutras’ and ‘‹Journey to the West› Opera’. In this fiction, the writer moves away from the authenticity of the traditional pilgrimage: here the monk is escorted by sinful-followers (i.e., a dragon-horse, a pig, a demon, and a monkey) capable of removing malevolent beings throughout the journey. Sun Wukong is the wild and skillful monkey that ascends to Buddhity, becoming a ‘Victorious Fighting Buddha’ at the end of the literary work. Later on, the Chinese work of fiction was used as a source of inspiration for the creation of Dragon Ball, a Japanese fantasy & martial arts manga. Published in 1984 as a manga and then adapted into an anime, Dragon Ball sketchily follows the Chinese work of fiction. After coming across Bulma, young Son Gokū decides to escort the girl in her quest to collect seven magic dragon spheres. The series’ success allowed the manga’s author, Akira Toriyama, to continue the story arc and launch a new series in 2015. Since 1986, several videogames with a monkey character have entered the market. The purpose of this article is to highlight the main affinities between Sun Wukong and his Japanese counterpart Son Gokū first, and then attempt to explain how the monkey character has become a world-famous symbol, and contextualise it into the phenomenon of ‘worldwide pilgrimage’.

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pham Ngoc Ham

“Journey to the West”, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, was adapted for cinematographic, theatrical and television production, amongst others and spread beyond China’s border, making it familiar to millions of readers and audience in many parts of the world, including Vietnam. On the journey to retrieve original Buddhist scriptures for China, the character Pigsy or Zhu Bajie is portrayed as a half-man, half-pig monster with both good and bad personalities which are represented by the animal part and human part. In the article, the analytical and synthetic methods are used to clarify the meaning and significance of the image of Pigsy or Zhu Bajie in “Journey to the West” by Wu Chengen, and this contributes to teaching ancient Chinese literature to Vietnamese students.


2021 ◽  
pp. 218-230
Author(s):  
N. E. Seibel

The results of the motivational analysis of Wu Cheng-en’s novel “A Journey to the West” are presented, the mythological meanings of individual object-material images are studied, a set of ritual actions related to hair is considered: pulling out wool, casting a spell, turning around. The idea of a variety of ritual functions of hair, endowed with mystical properties in many mythological systems, is taken as a starting point; they are included in thanatal, carnival and other contexts. It has been proven that all rituals related to hair in the novel combine the archetypal meanings of being chosen, initiation, carnival buffoonery and spiritual formation. A typology of ritual functions of hair and associated miracles is proposed. The first of the selected types of metamorphosis is carried out through manipulations that Sun Wukong masters in training with the sages: this is the creation of a copy of an object or creature with the help of which the hero avoids danger. The second object of the typology is a gift from the Bodhisattva Guanyin, which requires a certain inner work from the hero — choice, bargaining, creating a new object without a ready-made sample. The question is raised about the divine leadership of the process of becoming a hero.


Author(s):  
Farhad Khosrokhavar

The creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) changed the nature of jihadism worldwide. For a few years (2014–2017) it exemplified the destructive capacity of jihadism and created a new utopia aimed at restoring the past greatness and glory of the former caliphate. It also attracted tens of thousands of young wannabe combatants of faith (mujahids, those who make jihad) toward Syria and Iraq from more than 100 countries. Its utopia was dual: not only re-creating the caliphate that would spread Islam all over the world but also creating a cohesive, imagined community (the neo-umma) that would restore patriarchal family and put an end to the crisis of modern society through an inflexible interpretation of shari‘a (Islamic laws and commandments). To achieve these goals, ISIS diversified its approach. It focused, in the West, on the rancor of the Muslim migrants’ sons and daughters, on exoticism, and on an imaginary dream world and, in the Middle East, on tribes and the Sunni/Shi‘a divide, particularly in the Iraqi and Syrian societies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Oleg Aronson

The article is devoted to an analysis of the creative work of the Russian philosopher Valery Podoroga. It focuses on the special discipline he created, namely, “analytical anthropology”, and the book “Anthropograms”, in which Valery Podoroga sets out the basic principles and analytical tools of his philosophical work. Examining the books of the philosopher that preceded the creation of analytical anthropology and those that were written later, it is possible to single out two important lines of his research. First, the philosophy of literature and second, research in the field of the political. Podoroga’s understanding of literature is broader than that of a cultural practice or a social institution. For him, it is the space of the corporal experience of contact with the world, in which the affective aspect of thinking is realized. This line of analysis points to the “poetic” dimension of the experience of thinking, since the emphasis here is on what Jakobson called the “poetic function of language”, its orientation toward itself. It is precisely the literary aspect that becomes important when analyzing the texts of philosophers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger); however, what is even more important is that in the very experience of fiction Podoroga is trying to find new means for philosophy. His “poetic line” is closely connected with the poetics of space (Bachelard) and the phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, Henry). It is the combination of poetics and phenomenology that allows Podoroga to overcome both the orientation of poetics exclusively toward language and the categorical apparatus of philosophy. The main result of Valery Podoroga’s work is the creation of an “anthropogram”, a special kind of scheme in which the action of the Work (a literary work, but not only) is immanent to the dynamics of the world. Is it possible to create such anthropograms outside the field of literature? Podoroga does not specify. The article attempts to show how Podoroga’s ways of working with literary texts correlate with his works dealing with the technologies of power and violence, transforming separate political and ethical terms into anthropograms, that is, forms of thought immanent to life itself.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Zhang Meilan ◽  
Zhan Hao

Through examination of variants in two versions of Jinpingmei, three versions of Water Margin, two versions of Journey to the West, and between relevant sections of Qingpingshantang Scripts, Ancient and Modern Fiction, Jingshi Tongyan, and Amazing Stories, the existence of two trends of elegance and popularity in the orthography of different versions and literary works may be detected. Those texts with a more elegant character have been largely influenced by a strategy of standardized orthography, which is closely related to the creation purpose, knowledge, and cultural awareness of the authors, the willingness of booksellers to produce and sell such works, and their target consumers and readership. The differentiation between elegance and popularity in the character of literary works truly reflects the divergence of different texts within different social strata, which is not only a linguistic and philological question, but also a sociological one.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Castorina

In the garden of the world. Italy to a young 19th century Chinese traveler. On September 14th, 1859, at the first light of dawn, a young Chinese traveler named Guo Liancheng 郭連城 (1839-1866) landed in Civitavecchia, Italy, after a long journey of overland travel and months of navigation. Coming from a small village far from the capital, he was only 20 years old and was in the company of an Italian priest, Luigi Celestino Spelta. Guo was not the first Chinese man to visit Europe but before leaving, he decided to keep a daily journal of his experience, published soon after his return with the title of Xiyou bilüe西游筆略 (Brief Account of the Journey to the West). This book presents for the first time the story of Guo Liancheng, exploring a still little-known aspect of the history of the contacts between Italy and China. Following the pages of Guo Liancheng’s journal, the author tries to shed light on its contents and features and to analyze the image of Italy described in the pages of Brief account of the Journey to the West, the earliest firsthand account on the Bel Paese ever published in China.


Author(s):  
Najat Amhamad Hussein

    The discussion of the term issue is a complex subject that requires a lot of effort and time. It has provoked controversy among the various researchers for which they will try to solve these problems. In fact, terminology is the key to science, and we can never discover a science and its logic if we do not master its terminology. As a result of the explosion of knowledge in the world on the various fields of science, we find that the Arabic language is forced to keep pace with this scientific development and this wealth of terminology. This will only be achieved with the investment of specialists in this language by creating terminologies to name the scientific concepts that come from the West every day. For this, we will try in this study to address the subject of the creation of the Arabic term and the mechanisms to introduce it into the dictionary for all that is derivation, sculpture, translation, Arabization and renaissance of heritage. In addition, demonstrate the ability of the dictionary of linguistics in the unification of the latter between Arab scholars and attempt to eliminate the confusion in the dictionary and gaps that have been neglected by the Arab Organization.   ، ،،،،، 


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-78
Author(s):  
Sulayman S. Nyang

The rise of Western naval power in the world was the consequence ofthe earlier Iberian discovery of peoples, societies and cultures beyond theseas known to the Europeans of the early fifteenth century. It was indeedthese forays and adventures that gradually led to the imposition ofWestern colonial and imperial rule over what were previouslyindependent societies and cultures in Asia and Africa. The Muslimsocieties, along with Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Christian and traditionalAfrican peoples, were all brought under one European imperial roof,and their societies exposed to the transforming powers of Westernindustrial might.It was of course this rise of the West and the decline of the East that ledto the parcelling out of Muslim lands and to the alteration in the directionand flow of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the Muslims ofthe Indian subcontinent and their brethren elsewhere in Dam1 Islam.With such a division of the Muslim lands, each Muslim people livingunder a given colonial power tried to maintain its Islamic identityagainst whatever odds there were in that colonial system. Pakistaniswere part of this global phenomenon and the creation of their country in1947 dramatized the Muslim feeling of loss of unity and the urgent needto recover the universal feeling of Islamic solidarity which colonial ruleseemingly derailed from the tracks of human history.In this paper I intend to examine and analyze the role of Pakistan inthe Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). Working on theunderstanding that Pakistan at the time of the formation of the OIC in1969, was the most populous Islamic state in the world and that its verycreation was occasioned by the Islamic sentiments of the Muslim ...


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Semple

A Cultural History of Objects in the Medieval Age covers the period 500 to 1400, examining the creation, use and understanding of human-made objects and their consequences and impacts. The power and agency of objects significantly evolved over this time. Exploring objects and artefacts within art, technology, and everyday life, the volume challenges our understanding of both life worlds and object worlds in medieval society. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds.


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