Some Classical Malay Materials for the Study of the Chinese Novel Journey to the West
by Hoon Teik Toh
The objective of this study is to stimulate interest in looking further for a possible "missing link" between the two monkeys, Hanuman (the central figure in the Sundarakanda of Valmiki's Sanskrit epic Ramayana) and Sun Wukong 孫悟空 (the hero in the Chinese novel Xiyouji 西遊記 "Journey to the West", hereafter XYJ), in Classical Malay literature. I refer the reader to Nakano and Mair for more thorough treatments of Sun Wukong's origins and the secondary literature thereon as I shall, in this paper, confine myself to supplying the reader, for the very first time, with a few excerpts of Classical Malay texts accompanied by an English translation in order to show that they contain elements traceable to a common origin shared by XYJ. In so doing, I do not pretend to offer an ultimate solution to the long-debated problem but merely suggest that the clues to a solution, as with many other things in life, may be found in unexpected places.
Before we embark on perusing the extracts, a few general remarks on the Malay romances may not be out of place here.
Many of the Malay popular romances (hikayat) were transmitted orally for centuries before they were recorded in Jawi script. It is easy to imagine that not every single story or all the variations of a similar story have come to survive in writing. It follows that the limited number of written stories that have been studied present to us a far from complete picture of the literary products that at one time were current in Nusantara (Malay Archipelago). Though handed down in writing after the Malay people had been converted to the Muhammadan religion (15th century), pre-Islamic (mainly Hindu) elements are still abundant in them. A mixture of Indian and Perso-Arabic elements are usually observable.
Most of the stories were told and retold to Malay audiences by their tale-tellers or, as they were called in Malay, penglipur lara "soother of the afflicted, soother of cares". In general, the language is prolix, repetitive and, at times, may appear to modern readers to be monotonous, more so in translation. While trying to be faithful to the original in my translation, I have occasionally compressed two or more sentences by inserting a relative pronoun such as "who", "which", "where" etc. wherever necessary. The words maka, hatta etc. used frequently to begin a sentence in Classical Malay have no English equivalents and have to be left out of the English translation.
There are a considerable number of Classical Malay manuscripts that have never been read and await critical studies. In this study, I have used only published texts which are not limited to HSR(B), HSR(M) (the Brunei and Malaysian versions of the Ramayana) and HSS (a Malay recension of the Mahabharata) in which Hanuman occurs, but also include other Malay romances that were inspired by the oral narration of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the traditional Malay society and might have therefore preserved elements derived from a certain variant narrative of the epics that no longer exists.
Having kept in mind the basic facts mentioned above, let us now turn to read closely some passages culled from the Classical Malay texts. Attention is drawn to the parallels between XYJ and its Malay counterparts under "Remarks".