R&R Challenge: The Monkey King by Wu Cheng-En

The Rejuvenate and Renew Reading Challenge is hosted by Becky at One Literature Nut.  The challenge is to read three non-fiction books this summer!  Quite a challenge for me, but I gave it a go.  First I read Symbol and Magic in Egyptian Art by Richard Wilkinson; and I started, but wasn't able to finish, Reading Egyptian Art (also by Wilkinson). 

A few weeks ago, I read on writer Jeff Markowitz's blog that his first novel was about Buddhism.  Since I've been wanting to read more about Buddhism for a while now, I asked him if he could recommend any books on the subject.  Jeff's recommendation surprised me:  Monkey King by Wu Cheng-En.  Jeff assured me it was the best introduction to the subject of Buddhism he could think of.



The Monkey King tells the story of a Buddhist monk named Hsuan Tsang who walked from China to India and back again to bring Buddhist scriptures to his country.  But you'll forget all about that when you read it:  beautifully illustrated, it's a fable and adventure story whose protagonist is a monkey made out of stone.  The monkey leads all the other monkeys into a cave behind a waterfall, where they like to sleep; and because of his bravery, they make him their king.

As the monkey ages, however, he starts to get nervous about dying.  He doesn't want to leave the earth where he's having so much fun (can you say mid-life crisis?).  Someone tells him that a person can achieve immortality through the study of Buddhism; so he travels to the Cave of the Slanting Moon and Three Stars and devotes himself humbly to religious study.  His teacher releases him after many years, asking only that the Monkey King not use his newfound abilities to cause trouble.  Clearly this teacher knows NOTHING about monkeys, because the first thing the Monkey King does when he gets home is start to build an army.

The Monkey King is a very quick, enjoyable read, and it can definitely be read purely for pleasure.  But it also contains many layers of deeper historical and religious significance.  Since I was reading it as an introduction to Buddhism, here is what I learned:

• Buddhism is the shizzle:  You can become immortal and gain mad fighting skillz.  Awesome.
  
• Reality is all in the mind:  The Monkey King can bend reality and objects to his will, changing the size of the weapons, along with the size and number of himself.  He's definitely not constricted by reality as normal people experience it, and uses its bendable nature--along with his cleverness--to beat his foes.
  
• The Buddha is inescapable:  The only person the Monkey isn't able to defeat or trick is Buddha himself, whom the Monkey King meets.  He can somersault around the world, but he can't jump out of the Buddha's hand.
  
• Buddhism challenges authority:  The Monkey King mostly uses his powers to unseat, trick, and defeat powerful kings; which seems to suggest Buddhism was something of a subversive religion when it came to China.

Whether you're interested in Buddhism or not, I definitely recommend The Monkey King.  It's a fun story, and it's free to read online.

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Rejuvenate & Renew Reading Challenge: Reading Egyptian Art

Reading Egyptian Art by Richard H. Wilkinson

I want to start a Richard H. Wilkinson fan club.

Last month I did a review of Wilkinson's Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art. If you read that review, you might remember that my favorite part of that book was when Wilkinson discussed hieroglyphs and how they really are art--or rather, Egyptian Art is actually just hieroglyphs. An Ancient Egyptian statue is just a giant hieroglyph, according to Wilkinson.

Since I was intrigued by that part of book, I decided to order Reading Egyptian Art, also by Wilkinson, at my library. This book is basically all about Egyptian hieroglyphs and how they are reflected in Ancient Egyptian Art. The author takes each glyph and spends about a page each showing how the glyph is reflected in painting and sculpture.

As far as I am concerned, this book is full of awesome. I really, really want to buy it. The way Egyptian hieroglyphs match up to other Egyptian art is truly amazing and thought-provoking.

That being said, I wouldn't recommend it for a casual reader. The book is very much set up as a reference work, and isn't generally meant to be read cover-to-cover, I think. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs, or someone who has a fair amount of familiarity with Egyptian Art already.



I read this book as part of mjmbecky's Rejuvenate and Renew Reading Challenge, although I don't think it really counts, since I didn't finish it (had to return it to the library). However, I did enjoy this book and felt it deserved a post. Basically, the idea of art being a language--literally--fascinates me, and I hope I'll be able to find more writing on this topic.

Rejuvenate and Renew Reading Challenge

I joined mjmbecky's from One Literature Nut Rejuvenate and Renew Reading Challenge a few weeks ago.  Here are the details of the challenge:

Here's the challenge:

• Choose any three non-fiction books that deal with a topic you've wanted to learn more about. This could be money & finance, home decorating, budget tips, weight loss, nutrition, beauty & fashion, writing, religion, philosophy, literary theory, or even a biography. (You get the picture.) Basically, take three how to or self help books that you've been wanting to read, and join in!
• Read these books between June 1st and September 1st.
  
• Sign up by posting a simple comment below. (I didn't want to make things too complicated for this first challenge...for myself, or for anyone else!)
  
• Take the button created above and post in your own blog, with a link back here so that we can all see what everyone is reading.
• Review your books, and once a week I'll put up a post that you can link your own post/review.
  
• Enjoy finding out more about what everyone else is learning this summer!

I'm happy to report that I completed my first book in the challenge last night!  I chose to read Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art by Richard H. Wilkinson.



This book was recommend to me by Harmony0stars, and it was a great introductory book into the symbolism that's prevalent in Ancient Egyptian Art.

All of Egyptian art is functional--meaning it's never simply decorative.  All statues, paintings, and objects that we know from the art of the Egyptians served a spiritual and religious function.  It also likely had layers upon layers of symbolic meaning.  I'm not going to go into the specifics of how the symbols interact with each other too much, because that would be like rewriting the book (something I definitely don't want to do), but the types of symbols Wilkinson covers are:

• Form--self-explanatory.  What a thing is can take on symbolic meaning--for example, a mirror is not functional as just a mirror, but symbolic of Re Horakhty (god of the sun).
• Size--This essentially refers to hieratic scaling (where the most important people in the image are the largest and the least important are the smallest).  Hieratic scaling is not symbolic; however, in certain instances in Egyptian art, hieratic scaling can take on symbolic overtones.  Monumental statues, like the one of Ramses that inspired "Ozymandias," were likely made so big because things in the afterlife were supposed to be huge.
• Location--To the Egyptians, their land was literally the center of the universe.  The Nile reflected the river in the heavens (or the Milky Way), and the earth itself consisted of a series of worlds or concentric rings (Dante's Inferno, anyone?), with Egypt literally in the middle.  The location of temples and tombs often reflect this world view in a relative or absolute way.
• Materials--Certain materials contain certain symbolic connotations; kind of straight-forward.
• Color--Ditto; certain colors symbolize certain things.  One of the interesting points in this chapter is that colors were often interchangeable--green and black, for example, since black could be the earth and green symbolized fecundity.  Also, nearly all hieroglyphs written in an official capacity were color-coded to give added meaning to what was being written.
• Numbers--Not necessarily numerology, just a general symbolism of numbers that Egyptians thought were auspicious.
• Hieroglyphs--This was by far my favorite chapter in the book.  Hieroglyphs also had symbolic meaning and were pretty much analogous to painting or sculpture.  In fact, Champollion (guy who translated the Rosetta Stone) said "a statue is often 'in reality... only a single glyph, a veritable character of written script.'" (151)  The Egyptians thought the glyphs that decorated their temples came alive and had their own personality and symbolic meaning.  They not only read them phonetically, like we read our script, but ideographically, as a rebus, and as visual analogies and metaphors.  In comparison, our modern script seems pretty lame.
• Actions--Many of the actions pharaohs and others take part in on their tomb walls have symbolic meaning.  The jubilee race, for example, is something nearly every single pharaoh is shown taking part in.  The race was the pharaoh's symbolic claiming of the land of Egypt. 
• Gestures--Just like us (waving hello, shaking hands, flipping someone off), the Ancient Egyptians used symbolic gestures in everyday life which appear on their tombs.  This seems like an truly fascinating topic, but Wilkinson doesn't spend enough time on it, in my opinion.

So, as you can see, symbolism in Egyptian art is a very complex subject, which Wilkinson condenses into an admirably short and readable text.  I wouldn't say this is a good book for people who don't know anything about Egyptian Art to start with--I still think Egyptian Art by Jaromir Malek is the best introduction to the subject that I've come across--but if you do know the basics about it and are interested in the symbols of Egyptian Art, this is definitely a book I would recommend.  In fact, I would consider reading more of Wilkinson's books in the future.

So that's it for my first book in the Rejuvenate and Renew Challenge.  There are still two more to go!  I think I'm going to tackle Buddhism next with a book Rebecca at I'm Lost in Books sent me.  I just want to say thank you to mjmbecky for hosting this challenge and giving me an incentive to read the nonfiction books I wanted to this summer!  I am so happy I read Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art, and if it hadn't been for this challenge, it would still be sitting in my TBR stack.  So thank you, mjmbecky!

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