江流兒故事原型芻議

Abstract

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the story of ‘floating baby’ in the Journey to the West. The story itself has also been the focus of a few studies. The views on the origins of the story can be roughly divided into to two groups: one suggests that the story belongs to the Chinese indigenous folk literature and regional operas, such as the Random Words of East Qi and the Journey to the West in Opera, the other maintains that it was adapted from either the ‘King’s Jātaka’ or the ‘Sudra who killed his son’ of the Liudu jijing. This short paper briefly compares the details of different versions of the story and argues that the original source of this story is the fifth-century Chinese translation of the Samantapāsādikā. The paper also suggests that the floating-baby story of the Journey to the West is only one sub-version of the motif of ‘an abandoned birth and a glorious grow-up’ in the folk literature across the ancient world.