"With his sense of the ridiculous anchored in the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness, therefore, the author mocks all the monsters as he mocks all the pilgrims and celestials in the book. Not only is everything infinitely amusing to his observant eye, but in the ultimate religious sense everything that exists is but maya [illusion] with which we are infatuated. Even the most serious character and the one nearest to approaching an understanding of emptiness, Monkey himself, is not spared this affectionate ridicule. To readers conditioned to accept the reality of literary fiction, this attempt at constant negation can be at times very unsettling. Writing from the Christian viewpoint which accords reality to every soul be it suffering eternal damnation in hell or rejoicing in eternal bliss in paradise, Dante has created a massive comedy of substantial reality designed to elicit our strongest emotional responses. Wu Ch'eng-en, on the other hand, provides in episode after comic episode the illusion of mythical reality, but then inevitably exposes the falsehood of that reality in furtherance of his Buddhist comedy."