A Journey to the West
Western literature has no equivalent to The journey to the West. Imagine Dante mixed with Kabala, and peopled by Daniel Boone, Mother Teresa and Wile E. Coyote. This sixteenth-century epic is both one of the half-dozen most venerated works in classical Chinese literature and a staple of popular culture. Its ubiquitous characters and stories appear in comic books, advertisements, even postage stamps. It is, simultaneously, a dragons-and-demons adventure, an allegory of self-mastery, a political satire, an anthology of rich, symbolic poetry, and an esoteric alchemical recipe book. It's picaresque, fantastical, wise. And hilarious.
