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This book deeply explores the cultural, folklore and philosophical connotations of "Journey to the West", and interprets the folk beliefs, legends, monuments, historical facts, etc. Involved in the story of "Journey to the West". For example, "Journey to the West" and "A Dream of Red Mansions", why do they both start with stories about stones? The Golden Cudgel is the backbone of Sun Wukong. Why does it have to come from the sea? How was the bureaucracy of the ancient world of gods designed and arranged? What is the deep meaning behind the sentence "Since you can see the future, why not worship"? The author has insight into the subtle and profound details behind these stories, and provides readers with a comprehensive and in-depth perspective to understand this classic masterpiece.

This book attempts to get rid of the "hundred-episode-based" thinking in the field of "Journey to the West", pulls the focus away from the hundred-episode novels, and further restores the research object from "novel" to "story". From a cross-textual perspective, using the evolution and dissemination process of "Journey to the West" as clues, the three text systems of novels, operas, and raps are placed on the same plane for investigation, and their general rules and individual characteristics in the process of retelling and reproducing the story are studied. The book is divided into two parts: the first part is a historical description. Through the macroscopic grasp and microscopic examination of the "initiation period", "convergence period", "finalization period", "continuation period" and other evolutionary stages, especially through the key analysis and interpretation of opera and rap texts in the "post-hundred chapters period", the coordinate matrix of the entire historical trajectory is improved to restore the true ecology of the formation and development of the story community as much as possible. The second part is case analysis, taking "The Story of Monk Jiangliu" and "The Story of Liu Quan Jingu" as cases, advancing the lens to specific unit stories, and conducting a more in-depth and detailed sorting and comparison of the novels, operas, and rap texts surrounding them. On the one hand, it explores the logical connections between texts of different eras and genres, describing the story's origin trajectory and evolution process; on the other hand, it uses it as a model to more prominently present the impact of "cross-text" interpretive behavior on the shape of the story.