The Exalted Monkey in China and India

In the first lecture Prof. Schipper gave a wide-ranging historical survey of the various manifestations of the Monkey King in Chinese culture and society. Far from being confined to its prominent role in one of the great 16th-century vernacular novels, The Journey to the West, the Monkey King is an ubiquitous figure. It is found in aesthetic and ritual traditions associated with each of the three social strata constituting Chinese society: the folk, vernacular, and classical traditions. In the aesthetic realm this threefold social division corresponds to three contrasting complexes: folk theatre and oral story-telling; vernacular prose, and classical poetry. In the religious realm the corresponding complexes are spirit-medium cult and possession trance, temple and priest-centred vernacular transfer rituals of healing, and "automatic" writing. The aesthetico-religious complexes combine together in each social strata to express three specific social ideologies in which the physical embodiment of the Monkey King and its potential for creating disorder play a decreasing role as one moves away from the folk tradition.

The cult of Hanoman
In the second lecture Prof. Lutgendorf first discussed the exuberant richness of the iconographic representation of Hanoman as an expression of its widespread cult in contemporary Hinduism. Prof. Lutgendorf illustrated his communication with numerous diapositives and stories brought back from his recent fieldwork experience in India. Hanoman's prominence in current folk traditions was contrasted with what is found in scholarly accounts on Hinduism, which generally devote little or no attention at all to the "cult of Hanoman." This is despite the fact that this figure also plays an important role in the ancient Sanskrit version of the Ramayana as well as in the medieval Hindi Râmcaritmânas of Tulsidas. Although Hanoman appears in these two texts mainly as the exemplary figure of the perfect servant for Rama and his retinue, his loving devotion (bhakti) overflows in all directions and shows an extraordinary energy (shakti). Being a heroic and divine monkey, Hanoman also reconciles the extremes of humanity and animality, as well as different social forms of religiosity, and his position in Hindu folk religion can in fact be seen as a central one. Hanoman is the figure par excellence of the messenger, the go-between, and the intercessor.

'Good to think with'
One of the obvious aims of the Double Lecture Series is to promote comparative perspectives on literature and society. Prof. Schipper's socio-historical approach to religion and Prof. Lutgendorf's ethnographically oriented presentation of ritual and verbal art provided enlightening examples of the relevance of such comparative perspectives involving both different intellectual disciplines and different cultural traditions. In the Chinese and the Indian civilizations, as well as in most others, animals are "good to think with." One may now add with confidence that the monkey is remarkably so, no matter whether 'he' deliberately eats all the heavenly peaches of immortality and enrages the Chinese pantheon, or inadvertently swallows up the sun and plunges the Hindu world into temporary darkness.