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Podcast: The Cosmic Library
Episode: 4.3 The Hall of the Monkey King: The Flawed Mind Monkey
Description: You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King’s adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all this for the sake of ultimate, anarchic satire, for a livelier spirituality, or for other reasons: that all gets debated. Julia Lovell says in this episode:Literary critics have been arguing about the spiritual, religious elements of the book for centuries. Some ha...