3 pieces from Journey to the West — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
Fourteen years and ten thousand miles, and the pilgrims finally stand at the foot of the mountain where the scriptures wait. The last stretch is the strangest — a bottomless boat, a corpse in the river that no one will name, and a heaven whose clerks have their hand out. The road is almost done teaching.
A child hangs tied in a pine by the road, sobbing for rescue, and the kind monk cannot walk past him. The monkey smells a demon and is overruled. What follows is a fire ordinary water cannot quench, a monkey nearly killed by his own cleverness, and a child too dangerous for anyone but mercy to subdue.
An emperor wants the souls of his war dead set free, so he sends one gentle, fearful monk west to fetch the scriptures that can do it — a road no man survives alone. Five hundred years after heaven buried him, the strongest creature alive is still pinned under a mountain, waiting for someone to come by.