The Burning Mountain: A Story in Simplified Chinese and Pinyin, 1800 Word Vocabulary Level

As the monk Tangseng and his three disciples travel west, they find their path blocked by a huge blazing mountain eight hundred miles wide. Tangseng refuses to go around it, so his senior disciple, the monkey king Sun Wukong, must discover why the mountain is on fire and how they can cross it. He soon learns that he himself caused the mountain to ignite five centuries earlier. But finding out how to extinguish the blaze is a far more difficult and dangerous task…

This is the 20th book in the best-selling The Journey to the West series of stories for students learning to read Chinese. It is based on chapters 59 through 61 of the epic 16th century novel of the same name by Wu Chen'en. That novel was inspired by an actual journey by the Buddhist monk Tangseng, who traveled from Chang'an westward to India in 629 A.D. and returned seventeen years later with priceless knowledge and spiritual texts. Over the course of the book Tangseng and his companions face the 81 tribulations that Tangseng had to endure to attain Buddhahood.

The story is written using the 1200 word vocabulary of HSK4 plus several hundred words introduced in previous books in the series. It is presented in Simplified Chinese characters and pinyin, and includes an English version and glossary. A full audiobook is available on YouTube's Imagin8 Press channel.