| Baojuan, evolving from the folk talk in the Tang Dynasty, is one of the most important form of rap literature in ancient China and the classic text of folk religion in the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty. It is a special literary form involving literature, religion and openness. Among 1600 kinds of Baojuan covering more than 5000 versions existing at home and abroad, a large proportion involves the story of a journey to the west. This paper gets XiYou Baojuan involving the story of a journey to the west as research object. In the early study, many scholars have noticed the contact between the story of a journey to the west and XiYou Baojuan, but comprehensive study is still insufficient.Based on the 100-chapter edition, Journey to the West, this paper makes a further study with the method of combining text analysis and demonstration as well as the method of combining literature, religion, history and intellectual history. In addition to introduction, this paper will be divided into four chapters. The first chapter defines and sorts out the religious Baojuan of XiYou and analyzes its main characteristics. The second chapter analyses the origin of the religion of XiYou Baojuan and thereby deduces its relationship with original work of Journey to the West. The third chapter defines and sorts out the story of XiYou Baojuan and makes a comparative reading to analyze similarities and differences among them. The fourth chapter analyses the origin of the story of XiYou Baojuan and the fundamental cause of change and development.Through comparative analysis, the paper studies the differences and similarities between the XiYou Baojuan and Journey to the West, explores how they influence each other and the differences such as in region, faith between varieties of Baojuan, and shows the interaction between folk belief and folk literature. |
