Monkey King Shows Off his 72 Transformations—in Hindi

back

Tripitaka (Xuánzàng), the monk who went on a pilgrimage to India via the Silk Road to fetch Buddhist sutras in 630 A.D., returned to the Tang capital Xi’an, and set up his workshop at the Big Goose Pagoda in 645. He then spent two decades translating an impressive 657 Buddhist works from the Sanskrit.

Ironically, it has taken about the same amount of time for China to translate the much-loved, Ming Dynasty fictional account of his voyage, Journey to the West (西游记), also known as the Monkey King, into Hindi.

According to Zhonghua Dushu Bao (中华读书报), an online newspaper covering China’s publishing industry, in the late 1980s the Foreign Language Bureau commissioned an Indian author to stay at the Beijing Friendship Hotel and render the book in Hindi. With 80 of the 100 chapters completed, however, the author returned home, leaving the remainder untranslated. Another native Hindi speaker eventually finished the task, but for unexplained reasons—likely political, given the poor state of Sino-Indian relations over the years—the text was not immediately published, and then misplaced for many years.

But now the full text, all three volumes, have been published by the Foreign Languages Press (外文出版社).