Ending Our Journey to the West

“I’m going to miss Journey to the West,” my son confides. It’s early in the morning. We’re walking to summer camp, holding hands. We’ve spent the past nine months accompanying the monk Tripitaka on his journey from the Tang capital Chang’an —acquiring disciples Sūn Wùkōng, Zhū?Wùnéng, and Shā Wùjìng along the way — to seek Mahāyāna scriptures from the Buddha Tathāgata at the Great Thunderclap Monastery in the Western Heaven of India. Our heroes have almost completed their journey. The end is in sight.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on it,” I say, reflecting on our own journey reading. He immediately noted the frame-busting scope of time and place compared to, say, Harry Potter, and its frequent tendency to shift gears into bright, illustrative poems. Throughout spring semester our walking-to-school conversations often gravitated toward the parallels and differences between the Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism in our reading, and our own experience of Judaism. There were questions about reincarnation and why one would aspire to move beyond the karmic wheel of life. Halfway through the book he opined that “maybe it’s really all just about going through ordeals,” a thought more elegant and insightful than I ever dished up at age seven.

“Maybe we can read it again,” he suggests, reaching for the familiar.?This has been his stated goal since we started: I read the book to him during first grade and he reciprocates by reading it to me during second grade. As profoundly as I’ve loved our Journey to the West adventure, I don’t have the stomach for the same 1700-page investment of effort so soon. Plus it’s at odds with my own agenda, which is to build up our muscles to summit an entire unabridged Mahābhārata together. But his impulse to reread such a resonant book makes me smile.

“Yes,” I agree. “But not immediately. What I love about rereading books is that they change as we grow. What you see in Journey to the West as a seven-year-old is not what you’ll see when you read it at again as a teenager or in your twenties or again in your forties.” We seriously couldn’t have found a more perfect age for him to enjoy this story with a focus on Sūn Wùkōng’s brute strength or the monsters our heroes encounter on their way from Chang’an to the Great Thunderclap Monastery. But today’s enjoyment lays a foundation, catalyzed by life experience, to eventually bask in increasingly piquant and nuanced layers of meaning.

“The book will be different?” He seems like he’s straining to make sense of my promise, yet trusting that such a weird thing for me to say is actually true. How do I even describe this? The experience of treading water the first time I braved Homer’s Odyssey all by myself, struggling to stay on top of each plot point. Reading it again in my early 20’s under the mischievously grinning guidance of a St. John’s tutor with the support of a whole class of eager readers and recognizing that it’s truly more bizarre than anything Lewis Carroll ever wrote. And just this week cracking Book 5 and finding myself weighed down by the sense of ineluctability felt by Olympians and humans alike, each paragraph wrapping my heartstrings around my airways and squeezing them shut as my outsized fellow-feeling for Athena, Hermes, Calypso, Penelope, and Odysseus refuses to choose favorites.

“Yeah,” I say. “It will.” Books don’t change, I secretly believe. They’re just polished surfaces that chart our own evolution should we choose to look. I suddenly shrink beside the magnitude of what I imagine he’ll discover as he grows. I trust he’ll return to our stories to keep track of who he is. As long as I walk the earth, I hope he’s moved to share with me the reflections he sees.