The Journey to the West, Books 22, 23 and 24

This book contains the full text of the 22nd, 23rd and 24th stories in our Journey to the West series for people learning to read Chinese. The three stories told here are unchanged from the three original books except for minor editing and reformatting. In The False Buddha, Tangseng and his disciples arrive at Small Thunderclap Monastery where a demon traps Sun Wukong between two gold cymbals. Later, the travelers confront a giant snake and a huge pile of slimy and foul-smelling rotting fruit. In The Monkey Doctor, the king of Scarlet Purple Kingdom is gravely ill, sick with grief over the loss of one of his wives who was abducted by a nearby demon king. Sun Wukong attempts to cure the king with a treatment not found in any medical textbook. And in The Demons of Spiderweb Mountain, Tangseng begs some food from some gentle young women who are not at all what they appear to be. Trapped in their web, he waits to be cooked and eaten while his three disciples battle the spider demons, a horde of biting insects, and a mysterious Daoist alchemist. These three stories are written in Simplified Chinese and use a total of 1357 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 the Imagin8 Press website.