Rather than asking first, How reliable is an early 18th century map of the world?, we should instead begin by asking what we have to learn from a map that represents Asia so differently from modern cartographic versions. We might notice that while modern, European cartography had already arrived in Japan at this time, the mapmakers had different priorities. What? In “The Buddhist World Map in Japan and Its Contact with European Maps” Nobuo Muroga and Kazutaka Unno argue that the Buddhist map of the world (Nansenbushū bankoku shōka no zu) printed from wood blocks in Japan in 1710 is actually a visual representation of the travelogue, Si-yu-Ki or "Journey to the West" written by Hsuan-Tsang eleven centuries earlier. That travelogue itself was inspired by Fa-Hian's travel account of his...more >> own journey to the West written three centuries earlier, and inspired too the fanciful "Journey to the West" written by Wu Ch’eng-en in the 16th century, which was subsequently translated by Arthur Waley as "Monkey" in the 20th century. Both monks (Fa-Hian and Hsuan-Tsang) write in Chinese, as does Wu Ch'eng, but they all write about making an arduous overland journey to India, the home of Buddhism. Nobuo Muroga and Kazutaka Unno contend that Japanese mapmakersin the 18th century may have liked this version of the world precisely because China is as marginal in this view as Japan. But we could also argue that they are depicting another version of reality, one more intangible and potentially transcendent. How to map that particular story of power and longing in time and space?