The Journey to the West, Books 30 and 31

This book contains the full text of the final two stories in our 31-volume Journey to the West series for people learning to read Chinese. The stories told here are unchanged from the original books except for minor editing and reformatting.

In The Lazy Monk, the weary monk Tangseng and his three troublemaking disciples arrive at a city just in time for the annual Lantern Festival, when three Buddhas come down from the sky and gather up large quantities of special lamp oil. Unfortunately these are not true Buddhas but monsters. Later, the travelers come to a monastery where a strange girl is being held in a locked cell for her own protection. She claims to be the daughter of the King of India, but if so, who is the girl living in the king's palace?

In The Final Trial, the monk Tangseng and his three disciples approach Thunderclap Monastery in India, the home of Tathagata Buddha. But Tangseng's ordeals are not over yet. First, the travelers are mistaken for murderers and thieves and must talk their way out of jail with some help from Sun Wukong's body-changing magic. And when the pilgrims finally arrive at the home of the Buddha, they discover that bringing back the Buddhist scriptures is much more difficult than they expected.

These three stories are written in Simplified Chinese and use a total of 1344 different Chinese words. Each page of Chinese has a facing page of pinyin. The book includes a full English translation and glossary. Free audio versions of the three stories are available for free on YouTube's Imagin8 Press channel and on our website, www.imagin8press.com.