Journey to the West and Dante's Divine Comedy

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Recommended: The divine comedy preface

'O lady who give strength to all my hope and who allowed yourself, for my salvation, to leave your footprints there in Hell.’
At the very beginning of the Divine Comedy, Dante got lost in the wood and fell into a dream. In the dream, as an Alice in Wonderland-style dream, Dante met Beatrice and regarded her as a marvelous companion on the pilgrimage. Beatrice, as Christ for Dante, encouraged him to get out the entanglement of the forest when he was dying. “Under the powerful compulsion of this love for Beatrice, Dante entered into a new apprenticeship, an apprenticeship in the art of poetry as the path to reach the truth about their love.” That is a journey to feel love, to serve God. However, pilgrims are entitled to see God without an interpreter only if they become forgiven of sins. In the pilgrimage, with the timeless creed, Dante was very conscious of the nature of original sin, God-given salvation and the significances of the pilgrimage. . Dante was also aware of the care and love from God. As same as the Divine Comedy, The Journey to the West, as a well-known fiction in the East, also depicts a legendary pilgrimage of the Tang Dynasty. Buddha asked a Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, to obtain sacred texts in India and provided four disciples who can atone for themselves by helping the monk. After eighty-one adventurous experiences, the monk reached the “Western Region” and got sacred texts with his disciples. The similarity of the sacramental pilgrimage above diverse cultural and historic landmarks demonstrates that both Christianity and Buddhism exist side by side and share a common ground and comparability. Christianity and Buddhism have some similarities in the method to get salvation, however, their basic teachings ha...

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...Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Divine Comedy. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Classics, 2004.
Jacoff, Rachel. “Shadowy Preface: an introduction to Paradiso.” In cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, 205-25 .Cambridge: Cambridge Up, 2007
Yu, Anthony C. “Two Literary Examples of Religious Pilgrimage: The "Commedia" and "The Journey to the West.” The University of Chicago Press Vol. 22, No. 3, 1983,
Wu Cheng’en, “introduction to the journey to the West” Foreign Languages Press; 1 edition 2003.
Mao Chengrui.”浅析《西游记》中猪八戒的形象” (an analysis of the image of pig in the Journey to the West) The literary education no.1 (2010)
Dino Compagni, “Dino Compagni's Chronicle of Florence.” Translated by Daniel E. Bornstein University of Pennsylvania Press,1986
Bloom, Harold.”The Strangeness. of. Dante: Ulysses. and. Beatrice.” Chelsea House Publisher,2014

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