The Traditional “Three Cardinal Guides” Ethics in Journey to the West

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_26How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Journey to the West; Three Cardinal Guides; power structure; structuralist narratology; power discursive practice

Abstract

This paper takes the power structure in the text of Journey to the West as the research object, aiming to compare the differences between the fundamental power discursive practice in the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty (the period when the novel was completed) — namely the “Three Cardinal Guides” — and the relationships defined by the Three Cardinal Guides presented in the book. Through close reading of the text, this paper adopts the analytical method of Structuralist Narratology to analyze the ethics of the Three Cardinal Guides in the novel, namely the ruler-minister, father-son, and husband-wife relationships. It argues that the ethics of the “Three Cardinal Guides” in Journey to the West show a reversed trend compared to the social reality of the time: the “guiding authority” (the dominant subject in the power relationship) is often weaker than the subordinate object, and is thus subject to the control of the “minister”, “son”, and “wife”. This paper takes the three hierarchical relationships defined by the Three Cardinal Guides in the novel as the starting point, to demonstrate the “unorthodox” nature of the textual structure and the textual discursive practice of “the weakness of the guiding authority”.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mingze Gao
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/13
TI  - The Traditional “Three Cardinal Guides” Ethics in Journey to the West
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language and Cultural Communication (ICLCC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 235
EP  - 241
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_26
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_26
ID  - Gao2026
ER  -