The Journey to the West: Volume I

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What is allegory? How is allegory different from and similar to metaphor and symbolism? What examples of allegory have you read or watched? 

Teaching Suggestion: Journey to the West is a great adventure story, but it is also an allegory for important facets of Buddhist thought. Students may already understand a basic definition of allegory; they can be asked to provide their own definitions, activating their prior knowledge, before they are offered the first resource offered below. This first resource will help them refine their understanding of the term so that they understand both what it has in common with similar terms and how it is distinct from them. You might offer them this resource before asking them to list—and possibly discuss—various examples that they have encountered in their own reading and viewing. Then they can practice uncovering the allegorical meaning of a story with the Thomas King short-short story “Totem.”

• This entry from LiteraryDevices.net defines and gives examples of allegory.
• This short story by Thomas King offers a clear example of an allegory.