Say no more of how the four of them got clear, and rose on the wind behind the vajra-guardians.
Now the many people at the Temple of Saving Life in the Chen family village got up at daybreak, prepared fruit and dishes to offer as before, came down below the tower — and the Tang monk was gone.
This one came asking, that one came searching; all of them flustered and at a loss, crying out to heaven: “We have let a living buddha slip clean away!”
Presently, having no plan, they carried all the food they had made ready up into the tower, made sacrifice, and burnt paper.
From then on there were four great sacrifices a year, and twenty-four lesser ones.
And there were those praying over sickness, those praying for safety, those seeking a match or making a vow, those asking wealth and asking sons — no hour and no day but somebody came to burn incense and make offering.
Truly it was: in the golden censer a fire unbroken a thousand years; in the jade cup a lamp burning bright ten thousand.
But of that, no more.
Now the eight great vajra-guardians raised a second fragrant wind, and carried the four of them east in less than a day, until little by little Chang'an came into sight.
Now the fact was that Taizong, having seen the Tang monk out of the city on the third day before the full moon of the ninth month in the thirteenth year of Zhenguan, had by the sixteenth year sent officers of the Board of Works to raise, outside the Xi'an gate, a Tower for Watching for the Scriptures, to receive them.
Every year Taizong went there himself.
It happened that on that very day he had come out in state and climbed the tower again, when all at once he saw the whole western sky filled with auspicious haze, and gust after gust of fragrant wind.
The guardians halted in the air and called: “Holy monk — this place is the city of Chang'an.”
“It would not do for us to go down. The people here are sharp, and our shapes might be given away.”
“The Great Sage Sun and the other two need not go either.”
“Go yourself, hand the scriptures to your sovereign, and come straight back. We will wait for you up in the empyrean and hand our commission back in together with you.”
The Great Sage said, “What the venerable ones say is apt enough — but how is our master to carry the scripture-load?”
“How is he to lead this horse?”
“We shall have to go along and see him there.”
“Trouble yourselves to wait a little in the air; we shall not dare be late.”
The guardians said, “The other day the Bodhisattva Guanyin put it to the Tathagata that the journey out and back should take only eight days, so that the count of the canon should come out complete.”
“Four days and more have gone already. We only fear that Pigsy will covet wealth and rank and let the term slip.”
Pigsy laughed. “My master is to become a buddha, and I look to become one too — where would be the sense in my coveting anything?”
“A great coarse lout, am I?”
“Wait for me all of you here. When the scriptures are handed over I shall come straight back and turn round with you.”
The idiot shouldered the load, Sha Monk led the horse, Monkey took the holy monk by the arm, and all of them pressed the cloud down and came to earth beside the Tower for Watching for the Scriptures.
Taizong and his officers all saw them together, and he came straight down from the tower to meet them, calling: “Is it my royal brother?”
The Tang monk at once threw himself down and bowed.
Taizong raised him up, and asked further: “Who are these three?”
The Tang monk said, “Disciples I took in along the way.”
Taizong was overjoyed, and at once commanded his attendants: “Put the saddle on my own carriage-horse, and beg my royal brother to mount and ride back to court with me.”
The Tang monk gave thanks for the favour and mounted.
The Great Sage swung his gold-banded staff and followed close; Pigsy and Sha Monk steadied the horse and shouldered the load between them, and they went in behind the imperial train together into Chang'an.
Truly it was:
In that year, at the pure feast, they took joy in a rising peace; civil and military stood untroubled and showed their best men.
In the Water-and-Land arena the monks expounded the law; in the golden hall the sovereign dispatched his minister.
Imperial decree granted the travel rescript to Tang Sanzang; the scripture-scrolls matched the Five Phases from the first.
Refined through bitterness, the fierce fiends were destroyed one kind after another; the work done, today he goes gladly up to the capital.
The Tang monk and his three followed the imperial train in to court, and there was not one soul in the whole city who did not know that the scripture-seekers had come.
Now the monks of the Hongfu Temple in Chang'an, great and small, where the Tang monk had lived before, saw that the tops of several pines had every one of them turned to face east, and said in astonishment: “How strange!”
“How strange!”
“There has been no wind tonight — how have these treetops all twisted round?”
One among them, an old disciple of Sanzang's, said: “Fetch my robes, quickly — the old master who went for the scriptures has come back.”
The monks asked, “How do you know?”
The old disciple said: “In the year the master left he said this: 'After I have gone — it may be three years or five, it may be six or seven — watch the pine branches. If the tips turn east, then I am coming back.'”
“My master's is a buddha's mouth and a sage's word, and that is how I know.”
He threw on his robe and hurried out.
By the time he reached the west street the word was already about: “The scripture-fetchers arrived just now, and His Majesty has brought them into the city.”
The monks heard it, and came running in a hurry, and ran straight into them.
At the sight of the imperial train they dared not go near, and followed on behind as far as the outside of the palace gate.
The Tang monk dismounted and went in to court with the rest.
The Tang monk, with the dragon-horse and the scripture-load, and with Monkey, Pigsy and Sha Monk, stood below the jade steps.
Taizong sent word for his royal brother to come up into the hall, and granted him a seat.
The Tang monk gave thanks for the favour again and sat, and had the scripture-scrolls carried up.
Monkey and the others brought them out, and the attendant officers passed them up.
Taizong asked further, “What is the count of the scriptures?”
“And how were they got?”
Sanzang said: “Your servant the monk reached the Spirit Mountain and was presented to the Buddha, who dispatched the two venerables Ananda and Kasyapa to lead us first into the Jewel Tower, where a meal was granted, and then to the Treasure Pavilion, where the scriptures were handed down.”
“Those venerables demanded a present, and because we had not got one ready we gave them nothing — so they handed the scriptures over as they were.”
“We were making our thanks for the Buddha's kindness and going east when all at once a fiendish wind snatched the scriptures away.”
“Luckily my humble disciples have some divine power and went after it, but the scrolls were flung about and scattered everywhere.”
“And on opening them out, they were all blank — copies with no words on them.”
“Your servants took fright, and went back to bow and beg and plead.”
“The Buddha said: when these scriptures were first completed, a bhiksu-saint took them down the mountain to the house of Elder Zhao in Sravasti and read them through once, keeping the living of that house safe and delivering its dead — and asked no more than three pecks and three pints of grain-gold for it. He thought at the time he had sold too cheap, and their descendants after them would go short of money.”
“We knew the two venerables were demanding a present, and the Buddha knew it perfectly well, so we had no choice but to give them the purple-gold almsbowl Your Majesty had bestowed, and only then were the true scriptures with words in them handed down.”
“These scriptures are in thirty-five collections, and some scrolls were picked out of each collection and handed over — five thousand and forty-eight scrolls in all.”
“And that count makes one full basket.”
Taizong was more delighted still, and ordered: “Let the Court of Imperial Entertainments lay on a banquet in the East Pavilion to thank them.”
All at once he noticed the three disciples standing below the steps, their faces not like other men's, and asked, “Are your worthy disciples foreigners, then?”
The elder bowed low and said: “My eldest disciple's surname is Sun, his religious name Wukong, and your servant also calls him Sun the Pilgrim.”
“By origin he is a native of the Water Curtain Cave, Flower Fruit Mountain, in the country of Aolai in the Eastern Continent of Superior Body.”
“Because he made his great uproar in heaven five hundred years ago, the Buddha pinned him in a stone box under the Mountain of Two Frontiers in the western marches; and the Bodhisattva Guanyin urged him to good, so that he took refuge willingly.”
“It was your servant who came there and got him out, and in the matter of protection your servant owes this disciple a great deal.”
“My second disciple's surname is Zhu, his religious name Wuneng, and your servant also calls him Zhu Bajie.”
“By origin he is a native of the Cloud Ladder Cave on Blessed Mound Mountain.”
“Because he was making mischief at Gao Village in U-Tsang, the Bodhisattva likewise urged him to good, and it was thanks to Monkey that he was taken in.”
“All along the road he was strong at carrying the load, and useful at fording water.”
“My third disciple's surname is Sha, his religious name Wujing, and your servant also calls him Sha the Monk.”
“By origin he was a monster in the Flowing Sands River, and he too was urged to good by the Bodhisattva and took up the discipline of a monk.”
“And that horse is not the one Your Majesty bestowed.”
Taizong said, “The coat is the same colour — how is it not?”
Sanzang said, “Your servant was fording the water at Eagle Grief Gorge on Coiled Snake Mountain, and the original horse was swallowed by this one.”
“Thanks to Monkey, who fetched the Bodhisattva and asked what this horse was, it turned out to be a son of the Dragon King of the Western Sea, who had committed an offence; and the Bodhisattva got him released too, and set him to serve your servant as a mount.”
“At the time he changed himself into the likeness of the original horse, with markings to match.”
“Thanks to him we climbed the hills and crossed the ridges and struggled over rough country; going out he was ridden, coming back he carried the scriptures, and your servant owes much to his strength as well.”
Taizong heard him out and praised him without stopping.
He asked further: “Journeying so far into the west — how long was the road, exactly?”
Sanzang said: “By what the Bodhisattva said in sum, it is a hundred and eight thousand 里.”
“Along the way we kept no count; we know only that we passed through fourteen rounds of cold and heat.”
“Every day a mountain, every day a ridge.”
“The forests we met were never small; the waters we met ran wide and deep.”
“And we passed through the lands of several kings, all of whom checked and set their seals on it.”
He called: “Disciples — bring up the travel rescript and hand it in to His Majesty.”
It was passed up at once.
Taizong looked at it: issued on the third day before the full moon of the ninth month, in the thirteenth year of Zhenguan.
Taizong smiled and said, “You have laboured long and travelled far. It is already the twenty-seventh year of Zhenguan.”
On the rescript were the seals of the Precious Elephant Kingdom, the Black Rooster Kingdom, Cart Slow, the Women's Kingdom of Western Liang, Jisai, Purpuria, Bhiksu and the Dharma-Destroying Kingdom, and also the seals of Phoenix Immortal District, Jade Flower Prefecture, Golden Peace Prefecture and India.
Taizong read it through and put it away.
The officers in attendance were already inviting them to the banquet, and he came down from the hall hand in hand with him.
He asked further, “Can your worthy disciples behave themselves?”
Sanzang said: “My poor disciples are all fiend-bodies out of mountain villages and open waste, unversed in the etiquette of the sacred court of China. I beg Your Majesty to pardon their offences in advance.”
Taizong laughed and said, “No blame to them. No blame to them.”
“Let them all be asked to the East Pavilion for the banquet together.”
Sanzang gave thanks for the favour again, called his three over, and they all went into the pavilion to look.
It was indeed the great country of China, and not like ordinary places.
Now look at this:
Doors hung with coloured embroidery; the floor laid under with red felt.
Rare scents thick in the air; strange dishes fresh from the kitchen.
Amber cups, glass bowls, inlaid with gold and touched with kingfisher blue;
Yellow gold dishes, white jade bowls, set with brocade and wound about with flowers.
Turnips boiled soft; fragrant taro poured over with sugar.
Mushrooms sweet and rich; sea greens clean and strange.
Several times they brought more ginger-hot bamboo shoots; round after round they served up mallow dressed with honey.
Wheat gluten and toon-tree leaves; wood-ear fungus and beancurd skin.
Stone-flower and immortal greens; bracken starch and dried osmunda.
Radish boiled with Sichuan pepper; shredded melon tossed with mustard.
A few dishes of plain fare were well enough; but several kinds of rare fruit carried off the prize.
Walnuts and pressed persimmon cakes; longans and lychees.
Cocoon-chestnuts from Xuanzhou and dates from Shandong; ginkgo nuts from south of the river and hare's-head pears.
Hazels, pine nuts, lotus seeds and grapes, all large; torreya nuts, melon kernels and water-caltrop, all matched.
Olives and crab apples; pingpo and sand-fruit.
Arrowhead and tender lotus root; crisp plums and bayberries.
Nothing of any kind lacking; not a single article wanting.
There were steamed pastries too, and honeyed sweets, and fine dishes besides; and there was good wine, fragrant tea, and rarities.
There was no telling the hundred flavours of that rare fare, all of the first quality; truly the great country of China is not as the western foreigners are.
Master and disciples, four of them, with the civil and military officers, all stood ranged in attendance on either side.
The Emperor Taizong sat, as before, squarely in the middle.
There was singing and dancing, wind and strings, all orderly and grave, and so they took their fill of pleasure for a whole day.
This is just what is meant:
The sovereign's fine assembly outdoes Tang and Yu; the true scriptures got, there is blessing to spare.
Handed down a thousand ages, flourishing a thousand ages; the Buddha's light shines everywhere on the dwelling of kings.
That day grew late, and the banquet of thanks broke up.
Taizong went back to the palace; the officers went back to their houses.
The Tang monk and the rest returned to the Hongfu Temple, and there were the temple's monks knocking their heads on the ground to meet them.
He had only just come in at the mountain gate when the monks reported: “Master — these treetops all turned east this morning, suddenly.”
“We remembered what the master said, so we went out of the city to meet you — and here you are, sure enough.”
The elder was more pleased than he could say, and went in to the abbot's room.
At this time Pigsy did not shout for tea and rice, nor play the fool either;
Monkey and Sha Monk were each of them steady and grave.
It was only because the fruit of the Way was complete that they were quiet of their own accord.
That night they slept.
Next morning Taizong came up to court and said to his assembled officers: “I have been thinking of my royal brother's merit. It is very deep and very great, and I have nothing with which to repay it.”
“I lay awake all night and composed a few rough lines aloud, to stand for my thanks — but I have not written them down.”
He called: “Let an officer of the Secretariat come. I will recite it to you, and you will write it down one line at a time.”
The text of it ran thus:
I have heard that the Two Modes have their images, and show themselves in covering and bearing, so holding all that lives;
the Four Seasons have no shape, and work hidden through cold and heat to transform things.
So it is that in peering at the sky and looking into the earth, even the common and the dull may know their outline;
but in understanding the dark and seeing through the bright, few even among the wise and the sage exhaust their reckoning.
Yet heaven and earth enclose the dark and the bright and are easily known — and this is because they have images;
the dark and the bright dwell within heaven and earth and are hard to fathom — and this is because they have no shape.
So we know that where the image is manifest and can be verified, even the foolish are not confused;
where the shape is hidden and cannot be looked at, even in the wise there is bewilderment still.
How much more so the Way of the Buddha, which soars in emptiness, riding the dark, void and still.
It succours the ten thousand kinds on a great scale, and holds authority over the ten directions.
Raise up its awful power and there is nothing above; press down its divine strength and there is nothing below.
Make it great and it fills the whole of space and time; make it fine and it gathers into a hair's breadth.
Without ceasing and without arising, it passes a thousand fathoms and spans all antiquity;
seeming hidden and seeming manifest, it carries a hundred blessings and lasts to this day.
The wonderful Way holds the dark congealed within it, and those who follow where it leads do not know its limit;
the stream of the Law runs deep and still, and draw as they may they cannot sound its source.
So we know: could the wriggling common fool, the paltry and the vulgar, throw himself into the drift of it and be free of doubt?
Yet the rise of the great teaching is founded in the land of the west.
It rose into the Han court in a bright dream, and shone on the eastern region, pouring down mercy.
In the old days, when the shape was divined and the traces read, transformation was worked before a word had run abroad.
In the age when it was now seen and now hidden, the people looked up to its virtue and knew to follow.
But when the shadow dimmed and returned to the true, when he passed over and left the age, the golden face veiled its colour and no longer mirrored the light of the three thousand;
and the fair image was opened in outline, tracing on emptiness the thirty-two marks.
Thereupon the subtle words spread wide, rescuing the flocks of beings from the three evil paths;
the bequeathed instruction was proclaimed afar, leading the host of the living to the ten stages.
The Buddha has scriptures, and they can divide the greater and the lesser vehicle;
there are teachings besides, and they hand on the arts of error and truth, the crooked and the straight.
Our monk, the Dharma Master Xuanzang, is the leader of the gate of the Law.
In youth he cherished a true quickness, and early awoke to the work of the three emptinesses;
grown, he accorded with a divine clarity, and encompassed beforehand the practice of the four patiences.
Wind in the pines, moonlight on water — not enough to match his pure brilliance;
immortal dew, a bright pearl — how could they be set beside his clear lustre?
So it was that his wisdom went through unencumbered, and his spirit sounded what has no shape yet.
He passed beyond the six dusts and came far out, and made a thousand ages carry his fragrance.
He fixed his mind on the inner realm, grieving that the true was a hidden power;
he lodged his thought at the dark gate, where the many gates ran to error and mistake.
Wishing to sort them into their branches, he therefore lifted his heart towards the Pure Land, took up his staff and set out alone.
Drifted snow flying at dawn, and the ground lost along the way;
startled sand rising at evening, and beyond the void the sky bewildered.
Ten thousand 里 of hills and rivers, parting the mist and the sunset haze to press forward;
a hundred rounds of cold and heat, passing through frost and rain to leave a track ahead.
His sincerity weighed heavy and his labour light; his seeking was deep and his wish was to arrive.
He travelled the western regions round, fourteen years.
He went through foreign countries to the end of them, asking and seeking the true teaching.
The Twin Groves and the Eight Waters, where he tasted the Way and fed on the wind;
the Deer Park and Vulture Peak, where he gazed on wonders and looked up at strange things.
He received the ultimate words from former sages, and took the true teaching from the highest worthies.
He probed the abstruse at the gate of wonders, and exhausted the deep undertaking with precision.
The Way of the three vehicles and the six disciplines galloped across the field of his mind;
the writings of one canon and a hundred hampers surged like waves at the mouth of the sea.
Now the countries he passed through were without limit, but the scriptures he sought and took had a number.
In all he obtained thirty-five collections of essential Great Vehicle writings, five thousand and forty-eight scrolls by count, translated and set them out across China, and proclaimed the victorious work.
He drew the cloud of mercy from the western verge, and poured the rain of the Law on the eastern march.
The holy teaching, having been broken, is made whole again; the living, having sinned, have their blessings restored.
Warming the parching flames of the burning house, they are drawn together out of the dark road;
brightening the muddied waves of the golden water, they reach the far shore together.
So we know that evil sinks through the causes it makes, and good rises by the conditions it meets.
The beginning of that rising and sinking is a man's own doing, and nobody else's.
Take the cassia growing on a high ridge: only riding above the clouds does it get the dew on its blossom;
the lotus rising out of green water — flying dust cannot stain its leaves.
It is not that the lotus is pure by nature or the cassia chaste in its substance: it is that what bears them up is high, and so small things cannot encumber them;
what they rest on is clean, and so the muddy sort cannot touch them.
Now if grass and trees, which know nothing, can still draw on the good and become good — then how should men, who have understanding, not meet with blessing and so become blessed?
Now may these scriptures be handed on and spread abroad, and be endless alongside the sun and moon;
may great blessing be spread far, and be forever vast along with heaven and earth!
The writing done, he sent for the holy monk at once.
By this time the elder was already waiting outside the palace gate to give thanks; hearing the summons he came in quickly and performed the rite of prostration.
Taizong sent word inviting him up into the hall, and handed the writing across.
The elder read it through, came down again to give thanks for the favour, and said: “Your Majesty's language is lofty and antique, and the drift of its argument deep and fine.”
“But I do not know what it is called.”
Taizong said: “I composed it aloud in the night, meaning to thank my royal brother. It is called the Preface to the Holy Teaching. I do not know whether it is any good.”
The elder knocked his head on the ground and thanked him without stopping.
Taizong said further: “My talent is ashamed before the jade sceptres, and my words before bronze and stone.”
“As for the inner canon, I have heard particularly little of it.”
“To compose a preface aloud is truly coarse and clumsy of me.”
“I have fouled the golden tablets with my brush and ink, and set up tiles and rubble in a forest of pearls.”
“Looking over myself and examining my thoughts, my face is shamed and my heart is sick with it.”
“It is not at all worth praising, and you have thanked me for nothing.”
At that the officers all congratulated him together, bowed their heads to the imperial text of the Holy Teaching, and passed it round within the palace and without.
Taizong said, “Suppose my royal brother were to expound and recite the true scriptures once through — how would that be?”
The elder said: “Your Majesty — if the true scriptures are to be expounded, a buddha-place must be looked for.”
“A palace hall is not a place where they may be recited.”
Taizong was much pleased, and asked the officers in attendance at once: “Which monastery in the city of Chang'an is a clean one?”
Out of the ranks stepped the Grand Academician Xiao Yu, who reported: “In the city there is a Wild Goose Pagoda Monastery, and it is clean.”
Taizong at once ordered his officers: “Let each of you carry a few scrolls of the true scriptures reverently, and come with me to the Wild Goose Pagoda Monastery, and let my royal brother be asked to expound them.”
So the officers each carried their share, and followed the imperial progress to the monastery, where a high platform was raised and laid out neatly.
The elder gave his orders as before: “Pigsy and Sha Monk, take the dragon-horse and see to the baggage;”
“Monkey, stay at my left and right.”
Then he said to Taizong: “If Your Majesty wishes the true scriptures to be handed on throughout the empire, fair copies must first be made, and only then may they be distributed.”
“The originals ought further to be treasured away, and must not be lightly handled.”
Taizong laughed again and said, “What my royal brother says is very apt. Very apt.”
He thereupon summoned the officers of the Hanlin Academy and the Secretariat Section to transcribe the true scriptures.
And he built another monastery east of the city, and called it the Temple of the Fair Copy.
The elder took up a few scrolls and mounted the platform, and was just about to chant when all at once he smelled a fragrant wind winding about him, and the eight great vajra-guardians showed themselves in mid-air and called down loudly: “You who are reciting the scriptures — put down the scrolls and come back west with us!”
Down below, Monkey and the other two, with the white horse, rose straight up off the level ground;
The elder too threw the scrolls down, and rose from the platform into the ninth heaven, and went up after them into the air.
It threw Taizong and all his officers into such a fluster that they bowed down towards the sky.
And this is just what is meant:
The holy monk laboured to fetch the scripture-rolls, and went the round of the western regions fourteen years.
He went bitterly through the stages of the road and met calamity; he passed many hills and rivers and suffered setbacks.
The work complete at eight nines, nine more were added; the practice full at three thousand, and on to the great thousand.
The wondrous writings of the great awakening came back to the upper country, and to this day are handed down for ever in the eastern land.
When Taizong and his officers had finished bowing, he chose eminent monks at once and had a Mass of Water and Land built up in the Wild Goose Pagoda Monastery, where the true scriptures of the Great Canon were read and chanted, delivering the sinful ghosts of the dark world and spreading good fortune abroad.
The transcribed texts were spread abroad through the empire — but of that, no more.
Now the eight great vajra-guardians rode the fragrant wind, leading the elder and his three, with the horse — five mouths — and turned back to the Spirit Mountain.
Going and coming together, it fell within the eight days exactly.
At this time all the gods of the Spirit Mountain were before the Buddha, listening to a discourse.
The eight guardians led master and disciples in, and said to the Tathagata: “Your disciples earlier received the golden command, conveyed the holy monk and the others to the Land of Tang, and saw the scriptures handed in. Now we come expressly to return our commission.”
Then he called the Tang monk and the rest to come forward and receive their posts.
The Tathagata said: “Holy monk, in a former life you were my second disciple, and you were called Golden Cicada.”
“Because you did not listen to the preaching of the Law and slighted my great teaching, I demoted your true spirit and had you reborn in the eastern land.”
“Now I am glad you have taken refuge and held to my empowerment, and have availed yourself of my teaching to fetch away the true scriptures. Your merit is great. I promote you to the great office of right fruit: you shall be the Buddha of Candana Merit.”
“Sun Wukong: because you made your great uproar in heaven, I used a very deep power of the Law and pressed you under the Mountain of Five Phases. Happily the heaven-sent calamity ran its full term and you came home to the teaching of Sakya;”
“and I am glad you have hidden your evil and shown forth good, and earned merit on the road by refining away fiends and subduing monsters, whole at the end as at the beginning. I promote you to the great office of right fruit: you shall be the Buddha Victorious in Strife.”
“Zhu Wuneng: you were once the water-god of the River of Heaven, Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds. Because you got drunk at the Peach Banquet and made sport with a fairy maid, I demoted you to be born below, with a body like a beast's.”
“Happily you remembered to cherish a human body. You worked wickedness at the Cloud Ladder Cave on Blessed Mound Mountain, but gladly came home to the great teaching and entered my order, and guarded the holy monk on the road — though you still had a stubborn heart, and your appetite for women was not put out.”
“Because you earned merit carrying the load, I promote your office to right fruit: you shall be the Cleanser of the Altars.”
Pigsy shouted out: “They all get to be buddhas — how is it I am made a Cleanser of the Altars?”
The Tathagata said: “Because your mouth is strong and your body idle, and your food-gut is wide and roomy.”
“Now in the four great continents under heaven there are a great many who look up to my teaching, and at every buddha-service I shall have you cleanse the altars. It is a grade with something to be had out of it. How is that not good?”
“Sha Wujing: you were once the Great General Curtain-Lifter.”
“Formerly, because you smashed a glass cup at the Peach Banquet, I demoted you to the world below, and you fell into the Flowing Sands River and worked wickedness, taking life and eating men.”
“Happily you came home to my teaching and held reverently to the empowerment, guarded the holy monk, and earned merit climbing mountains and leading the horse. I promote you to the great office of right fruit: you shall be the Arhat of the Golden Body.”
Then he called the white horse: “You were a son of Dragon King Guangjin of the Great Western Ocean. Because you disobeyed your father's command, you committed the crime of unfilial conduct.”
“Happily you had the fortune to take refuge in body and in law, and enter my order, and every day of it we owed to you the carrying of the holy monk west, and the carrying of the holy scriptures east. You too have merit. I promote your office to right fruit: you shall be the Dragon-Horse of the Eight Classes.”
The elder and his three all knocked their heads on the ground and gave thanks for the favour.
The horse gave thanks for the favour too, and it was done.
He ordered the Guardians as before to lead the horse down to the edge of the Dragon-Making Pool, on the cliff behind the Spirit Mountain, and push him into the water.
In a moment the horse gave himself a stretch, shed his hide, exchanged his head for a horned one, grew golden scales the length of his body and silver whiskers under his jaw, with an auspicious vapour about him and lucky clouds at his four claws; and he flew out of the Dragon-Making Pool and coiled himself round the sky-propping ornamental pillar inside the mountain gate.
All the buddhas praised the great Law of the Tathagata.
Then Monkey said to the Tang monk: “Master — now that I have become a buddha, the same as you, surely I am not still to wear the golden band? Are you still going to recite that tightening spell and squeeze me with it?”
“Say the loosening spell quickly and get it off, and smash it to powder — and do not let that Bodhisattva of yours go and play tricks on anybody else with it.”
The Tang monk said: “At the time it was only because you were hard to manage that I used this method to control you.”
“Now that you have become a buddha it is naturally gone. How could there be any reason for it to be still on your head?”
“Try feeling for it.”
Monkey put up his hand and felt, and sure enough it was not there.
At this the Candana Buddha, the Buddha of Strife, the Cleanser of the Altars and the Arhat of the Golden Body all came into their proper places of right fruit, and the Heavenly Dragon-Horse likewise returned to the true.
There are verses in witness of it.
The poem runs:
The single body of True Suchness turned and fell into the dust; harmonising the Four Marks, he cultivated the body anew.
In the reckoning of the Five Phases, form is empty and still; the hollow names of a hundred fiends — speak of them no more.
Right fruit for Candana, who returns to the great awakening; the grade of office completed, he sheds the sinking under.
The scriptures handed on through the empire, the light of grace is wide; the Five Saints sit high at the gate of no-two.
At the time the Five Saints came into their fruit of office, all the buddhas, bodhisattvas, holy monks, arhats, Guardians, bhiksus, laymen and laywomen, the immortals of every mountain and cave, the great gods, the Ding and Jia spirits, the Sentinels, the monastery guardians and the local earth-gods — every master and immortal who had attained the Way, who had all come at the outset to hear the discourse — now each went back to his own station.
Now look at this:
On the head of Vulture Peak the rosy colours gather; in the Land of Utmost Bliss the lucky clouds collect.
The golden dragon lies steady; the jade tiger is at ease.
Crow and hare come and go as they please; tortoise and snake coil about at your pleasure.
Cinnabar phoenix and blue simurgh, their spirits bright and free; dark ape and white deer, their minds glad and content.
Rare flowers of the eight seasons; immortal fruit of the four seasons.
Tall pines and ancient junipers; kingfisher-green cypress and slender bamboo.
Five-coloured plum now in flower, now in fruit; the ten-thousand-year peach now ripening, now fresh again.
A thousand fruits and a thousand flowers vying in beauty; a whole sky of auspicious haze in swirling profusion.
The whole assembly joined their palms, took refuge, and chanted together:
“Homage to Dipamkara, Buddha of Antiquity.
“Homage to Bhaisajyaguru, King of Lapis-Lazuli Radiance, the Medicine Buddha.
“Homage to Sakyamuni Buddha.
“Homage to the Buddhas of past, future and present.
“Homage to the Buddha of Pure Joy.
“Homage to Vipasyin Buddha.
“Homage to the King of the Jewelled Banner Buddha.
“Homage to Maitreya, the Honoured Buddha.
“Homage to Amitabha Buddha.
“Homage to the Buddha of Measureless Life.
“Homage to the Buddha Who Receives and Leads Back to the True.
“Homage to the Buddha of the Indestructible Diamond.
“Homage to the Buddha of Jewelled Light.
“Homage to the Dragon-Honoured King Buddha.
“Homage to the Buddha of Zealous Good.
“Homage to the Buddha of Jewel Moonlight.
“Homage to the Buddha Who Shows No Folly.
“Homage to Varuna Buddha.
“Homage to Narayana Buddha.
“Homage to the Buddha of Merit's Flower.
“Homage to the Buddha of Talent and Merit.
“Homage to the Buddha of the Good Wandering Step.
“Homage to the Buddha of Candana Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of the Mani Banner.
“Homage to the Buddha of the Shining Torch of Wisdom.
“Homage to the Buddha of Sea-Virtue and Bright Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Great Mercy's Light.
“Homage to the King Buddha of Merciful Power.
“Homage to the Buddha Worthy, Good and Foremost.
“Homage to the Buddha of Vast Adornment.
“Homage to the Buddha of Golden Flower Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Talent and Brightness.
“Homage to the Buddha Victorious in Wisdom.
“Homage to the Buddha of the World's Still Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Sun and Moon Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Sun, Moon and Pearl Light.
“Homage to the King Buddha Victorious with the Banner of Wisdom.
“Homage to the Buddha of Wondrous Sound.
“Homage to the Buddha of the Constant Light Banner.
“Homage to the Buddha, Lamp of the World's Regard.
“Homage to the King Buddha Victorious in the Law.
“Homage to the Buddha of Sumeru's Light.
“Homage to the King Buddha of Great Wisdom's Power.
“Homage to the Buddha of Golden Sea Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Great Penetrating Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Talent's Light.
“Homage to the Buddha of Candana Merit.
“Homage to the Buddha Victorious in Strife.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva Guanyin.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva Mahasthamaprapta.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva Manjusri.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra.
“Homage to the Bodhisattvas of the Pure Great Ocean-Assembly.
“Homage to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the Lotus Pool Assembly.
“Homage to all the Bodhisattvas of the Western Heaven, the Land of Utmost Bliss.
“Homage to the three thousand great Bodhisattva-Guardians.
“Homage to the five hundred great Bodhisattva-Arhats.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva-bhiksus, laymen, laywomen and nuns.
“Homage to the Bodhisattvas of the boundless, measureless Law.
“Homage to the holy Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas of the Diamond.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva Cleanser of the Altars.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva-Arhat of the Golden Body and Eight Treasures.
“Homage to the Bodhisattva Dragon of the Eight Classes, of Vast Power.
“And so with all the buddhas of every world:
“May this merit adorn the Buddha's Pure Land,
“above, repay the fourfold grace; below, relieve the suffering of the three evil paths;
“if there be any who see or hear, may they all raise the mind of enlightenment;
“may we be born together in the Land of Utmost Bliss, and give this one body wholly in return.”
“All buddhas of the ten directions and the three times, all honoured bodhisattvas and mahasattvas — mahaprajnaparamita.”
《The Journey to the West》 ends here.
The chapter that keeps looking away. The last chapter of a hundred opens by turning its back on its heroes. 且不言 — let us not speak of — and the storyteller sets the pilgrims aside in mid-flight to go and watch the villagers they crept away from at midnight, coming down with the breakfast tray to an empty tower.
It does that seven times. Where the chapter before stayed with one party throughout, this one cuts constantly: the village, then Chang'an, then the pilgrims, then the monks of the temple where the Tang monk lived before any of it started, then Vulture Peak. The shape of the ending is the shape of a man leaving several places at once.
And the people he leaves keep doing the same thing. The village, having no plan, carries the untouched breakfast upstairs and burns paper money — which is what Chinese households do for the dead — and inside a paragraph has invented four great sacrifices a year and twenty-four small ones. Read what the queue at the door is asking for: health, safety, a marriage, a vow, money, a son. Nobody wants enlightenment. They want what people have always wanted, and four travellers have been slotted into a vacancy.
⚠ The word for what they are doing, 祭賽, occurs twenty-eight times in the novel and twenty-two of them are in the chapter where these same villagers handed over a boy and a girl every year to the river spirit. They have kept the word and changed only what it points at.
Eleven years on a tower. Taizong sent the Tang monk out on the third day before the full moon of the ninth month, in the thirteenth year of his reign. Three years later he had officers of the Board of Works raise a tower outside the city gate for the single purpose of watching the western road, and he climbed it himself every year after that.
The novel gives that vigil eight characters — 太宗年年親至其地, every year Taizong went there himself — and then says it was a happy chance that he was up there on the day it finally happened. Eleven years of looking at an empty sky is the price of the coincidence, and the book spends no more words on it.
⚠ And when he sees them, the first thing out of his mouth is a question. Not a proclamation, not a greeting: is it my royal brother? He made the man his brother by decree so the errand would be family business, and after fourteen years he is not certain the figure in front of him is the one he sent.
Then he asks who the other three are, and gets six characters back — disciples picked up along the way. That is the only description their master ever gives of them to his sovereign, and it leaves out everything you have spent ninety chapters learning.
Heaven's tollgate, reported to a foreign court. Asked how the scriptures were got, the Tang monk tells the Tang court the whole thing, and a lesser book would have cut it. The Buddha's two attendants demanded a present. He had not brought one. So they handed over a canon of blank paper, and the pilgrims only found out because a thief tore the bundles open in a wind.
The word for the present, 人事, is not human affairs here. It is the customary gift you slip an official to get a thing done. In plain English he is telling his emperor that heaven asked him for a bribe.
⚠ And then four characters that make the episode land, dropped in without emphasis: 佛祖明知, and the Buddha knew it perfectly well. Not a lapse of supervision, not two bad apples at the door. Policy.
What finally bought the scriptures was the purple-gold almsbowl Taizong himself gave the Tang monk at the send-off. He is standing in front of the man who gave it to him, explaining that he handed it over at the door.
The preface is real, and the novel edits it. The longest set piece in this chapter is not the novelist's work. The historical Taizong wrote the 聖教序, the Preface to the Holy Teaching, in 648 for the historical Xuanzang. It was cut in stone within a few years, and students of Chinese calligraphy have copied it ever since. The book quotes it whole, eight hundred characters of it, introduced by a man who lay awake all night composing it in his head and then called it rustic doggerel.
Look at what it opens with. Not the Buddha, not the scriptures, not India: the sky and the ground, the four seasons, the dark and the bright, in the vocabulary of the Chinese classics. Twenty-two lines pass before Buddhism is mentioned, and the emperor arrives at it through 況乎, how much more so — if the invisible defeats the cleverest man alive, then this is more invisible still.
It also says two things an imperial endorsement is not supposed to say: that the teaching is founded in a foreign land, and that what gets handed down includes the crooked as well as the sound.
⚠ And then the novel reaches in and changes a number. The transmitted preface says Xuanzang was away seventeen years, which is what it took him. This edition prints fourteen, which is how long its own pilgrim has been on the road. It quotes a genuine seventh-century document faithfully for forty lines and then bends one character so the real journey agrees with the invented one.
Nobody reads the scriptures. This is the strangest fact about the last chapter, and the novel never points at it.
The scriptures are fetched, counted, listed, carried across a capital by the civil service, praised, copied out by the finest calligraphers in the empire, and archived. The Tang monk's first substantive advice about them is a filing policy: make fair copies, circulate those, and lock the originals away where nobody can handle them. So the particular scrolls that cost fourteen years, a night storm and an almsbowl are never to be opened.
⚠ The emperor then founds a monastery and names it after a clerical procedure. 謄黃寺 — tenghuang was the technical term for making the fair copy of an imperial edict on the correct yellow official stationery. Not named for a buddha, not for a virtue, not for the road or the men who walked it. Named for neat handwriting.
And the one time somebody is actually on the point of reading a scripture aloud — platform built, court assembled, scrolls in his hands, 方欲諷誦, just about to chant — heaven interrupts to take the reader away. He throws the scrolls down and goes, and the emperor of China ends the scene on his knees in a courtyard bowing at empty air.
The appointments board. The climax of the novel is conducted as a personnel exercise. 受職, receive your posts. 加陞大職, promoted to great office. 品級, a grade — the word for a rank on the civil-service scale. Heaven has a pay structure, and the Buddha reads out the appointments.
Set the offences side by side and the scale of it lands. The Tang monk dozed during a sermon. Sha Monk broke a glass cup at a banquet. Pigsy got drunk and pestered a fairy. The sentences were ten lifetimes, eight hundred years of eating travellers at a ford, and a pig's body.
⚠ And Pigsy is the only one who speaks. They all get to be buddhas — how is it I am made a Cleanser of the Altars? He has counted, and he is right. The Buddha's answer is the coldest thing in the chapter: your mouth is strong and your body is lazy and your gut is wide, so at every service in the four continents you shall clean the altars — 有受用的品級, 如何不好, a grade with something to be had out of it, how is that not good? He is being sold an unglamorous posting on its perquisites. The novel does not record him answering.
The horse bows too. 馬亦謝恩訖 — six characters, closed with a clerk's word, the one stamped at the foot of a finished document.
The band that came off by itself. Monkey's first words after being made a buddha are about the iron ring on his head, and the first thing he says is 與你一般, the same as you. He and his master are now the same rank, so he would like the ironmongery off.
He has asked for this before. He asked the Tang monk in chapter twenty-seven and was told plainly there is no such spell. He offered the band as a pledge in chapter forty-two. He asked Guanyin in chapter fifty-seven and got the same answer. He asked the Buddha in chapter fifty-eight, and again in chapter seventy-seven. Five chapters, seventy-three chapters of asking, and the answer never changed.
⚠ And the resolution is that there was never anything to resolve. 自然去矣 — it has gone of itself. Nobody removed it, and no loosening spell was needed, because the band was only ever held on by what he was.
The Tang monk's last words in the whole novel are 你試摸摸看 — go on, have a feel. After a hundred chapters of sermons and reproach, that is his final line to Monkey. The band has been on that head since chapter fourteen; it leaves in seven characters, with nobody noticing but the one wearing it, who puts a hand up to check.
The last nine characters. The assembly closes the book with a liturgy that any Chinese Buddhist would recognise and could join in — sixty-three lines of homage, opening with a buddha of a previous age and running down through forty-eight names to the bodhisattvas and finally to the ordinary monks and laypeople sitting in the temple.
⚠ And the four pilgrims and the horse are chanted inside it. The Buddha of Candana Merit and the Buddha Victorious in Strife, named four hundred characters earlier, sung back at them by a congregation of eternal buddhas while they stand in it. The liturgy is even more generous than the appointments board was: the Buddha made Pigsy an envoy and refused him buddhahood to his face, and the assembly chants his name with bodhisattva on the end.
The closing prayer then turns and speaks to whoever is listening — 若有見聞者, if there be any who see or hear — which, in a printed book, is the person holding it.
⚠ Then nine characters, and they are the last in the novel. There is no listen, and the next instalment will explain. All ninety-nine chapters before this one end on that promise, and this one does not — the storyteller who spent a hundred chapters getting you to come back tomorrow has run out of tomorrow. The book names itself once, in that final line, the only place in a hundred chapters where its own title appears in its own text. And the verb is not finished or completed: 至此終, reaches this point and stops, which is exactly what a journey does.