Lost temples, eternal stories: monkey pilgrim and semiotic translation from Nagapattinam to Quanzhou along the maritime silk road

Hanumanic devotion did not travel alone. Along the maritime currents linking Tamil temples of Nagapattinam with the Buddhist sanctuaries of Quanzhou, the divine monkey of South Indian epic lore entered new worlds of meaning, gesture, and form. Rather than a simple replication, the result was a semiotic transformation that produced a cosmologically ambivalent Monkey Pilgrim, re-scripted within Buddhist ritual, sculpture, marionette drama, and vernacular literature. This hybrid figure, encoded in stone on the West Pagoda of Kaiyuan temple and animated in the marionette play Sanzang Qujing, moved across media as a dynamical object—an interpretive force shaped and reshaped in transit. Such signs are never still. In poetic and narrative traditions of the Song period, including texts such as Yijian zhi, the monkey becomes a cipher for karmic entrapment, spiritual aspiration, and moral unease. Here, semiotic translation is not a mechanical transfer but a living process—one that unfolds across textual, visual, and performative thresholds, and is sustained by maritime routes, religious flows, and acts of embodied interpretation. The journey from Hanuman to the Monkey Pilgrim is not one of loss but of proliferating significance, carried forward by oceanic motion and cultural reimagination through a living chain of interpretants.