![]() Several threads and key characters from earlier books come together. The final story, The Journey Begins, marks the end of the first section of the novel, as we wrap up the preliminaries and begin the actual journey. This seemingly harmless conversation between two minor characters triggers a series of events that eventually cost the life of a supposedly immortal being, and cause the great Tang Emperor himself to be dragged down to the underworld. One of the men, a fisherman, tells his friend about a fortune-teller who advises him on where to find fish. The story starts innocently enough, with two good friends chatting as they walk home after eating and drinking at a local inn. While this book has some light moments, it also has some of the darkest and most frightening scenes of all the stories we’ve told so far, with a series of horrifying visions of after-death punishment of evildoers that are reminiscent of those in Dante’s Inferno. ![]() The next story, The Emperor in Hell, tells the last story leading up to the start of the actual journey to the west in Book 6. We witness their terrible ordeals around the time of Xuanzang’s birth, and we then jump ahead to when he turns eighteen, learns of his true parentage, and avenges his parents. Then we meet the young couple – Guangrui and Wenjiao – who become Xuanzang’s parents. ![]() Our story begins with the Buddha’s decision to bring his wisdom to China. ![]() ![]() Unlike the previous books which told of Sun Wukong’s great adventures (and misadventures) across heaven and earth, this story deals with smaller, human-scale events and the traditional themes of love, loyalty, treachery and revenge. In The Young Monk, we tell the story of Xuanzang, the monk chosen by the Buddha to undertake the dangerous journey westward to India and bring sacred wisdom back to China. This book is a compilation of books 4, 5 and 6 in our Journey to the West series of story books for people learning to read Chinese.The three stories told here – The Young Monk, The Emperor in Hell, and The Journey Begins – are unchanged from our original versions except for minor editing and reformatting. ![]()
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