Now the fiend’s fire-glow ran on ahead, and the Great Sage’s rosy radiance came after. As they went, a high mountain rose before them. The fiend gathered in his red light, resumed his true form, and plunged into a cave, from which he brought out a nine-toothed muckrake to give battle.
The Pilgrim shouted at him: “Filthy fiend! From what quarter do you come, you demon? How do you know old Sun’s name and title? What powers have you? Declare them honestly and I will spare your life.”
The fiend said: “So you do not know my sort. Come forward and stand steady, and I will tell you. I —”
From birth my nature was dull and slow; I loved my leisure, doted on sloth, and never left off.
I never nourished the nature nor cultivated the real, but drowsed in chaos, my heart benighted, and boiled the days and months away.
Then all at once, in my idling, I met a true immortal, and we sat down together and spoke of cold and warmth.
He urged me to turn my heart back, not to sink into the common, for injuring life heaps up sin without limit.
“When the Great Term comes at last and the mandate of life is done, through the Eight Adversities and the Three Paths your regret will never cease.”
Hearing him, my purpose turned, and his words called my heart back, and I begged the marvellous formula.
Fate served: there and then I bowed and took him for master, and he showed me the Gate of Heaven and the Portal of Earth.
I received the Nine-Cycle Great Reverting Cinnabar, and the work went on, by night and day, with never a pause.
Up to the crown-gate, to the Palace of the Muddy Pellet; down to the sole of the foot, to the Bubbling Spring.
The kidney-water circled round and entered the Flowery Pool; the cinnabar field was replenished, warm and warmer still.
The Infant and the Fair Maid were matched, yin to yang; lead and mercury were cast together, dividing sun from moon.
The Li-dragon and the Kan-tiger were brought to accord; the numinous tortoise drank up the golden crow’s blood.
The Three Flowers gathered at the crown and found their root; the Five Breaths turned to the origin and coursed through, clear.
Merit rounded, practice full, I rose and flew aloft; the immortals of heaven came pair by pair to meet me.
Beneath my feet the coloured clouds sprang bright; light of frame and sound of limb, I attended the golden gates.
The Jade Emperor laid a feast and assembled all the immortals; each was allotted his grade and ranged in his file.
By decree I was made Marshal, set over the River of Heaven, commander of the water-troops, styled a bearer of the tally of office.
It was only that the Queen Mother held her Peach Assembly and opened her banquet at the Jasper Pool, summoning all her guests.
By then the wine had me, and my wits were dulled; I lurched east and reeled west and made a wild disgrace.
Playing the bravo, I blundered into the Palace of Spreading Cold, and a lissome immortal maiden came out to meet me.
One look at her face, and it took a man’s soul; my old mortal heart proved hard to put out.
I lost all sense of above and below, of honour and degree, and laid hold of Chang’e, demanding she lie with me.
Again and yet again she would not consent, but dodged east and hid west, her heart ill-pleased.
My lust ran heaven-high, my bellowing rolled like thunder, and I all but shook the towers of the Heavenly Gate to the ground.
The Inspector-Marshal made report of me to the Jade Emperor, and on that day my destiny ran ill.
The Palace of Spreading Cold was ringed so close no wind could pass; with no way forward or back, escape was past contriving.
So the assembled gods laid hold of me, and with the wine still in my heart I felt no fear.
Haled to the Hall of Divine Mists before the Jade Emperor, I was tried by statute and condemned to execution.
Then, thanks to the Great White Planet, Li the Metal Star, who stepped from the ranks and bowed his brow and pleaded for me himself,
the sentence was commuted: two thousand strokes of the hammer, flesh split, skin burst, and the bones near breaking.
Left alive, I was banished out at the Heavenly Gate, and under Fuling Mountain sought a household and a living.
For my guilt I entered the wrong womb, and in the world they call me Zhu Ganglie, Bristles the Boar.
Hearing this, the Pilgrim said: “So you are the Water God of the Heavenly Reeds, come down into the world. No wonder you know old Sun’s name.”
The fiend gave a snort. “Hnh! You Ban-horsemaster, you deceiver of your betters! When you stirred up that calamity in your day, you have no idea how many of us you dragged down with you — and now you come here to bully men again. No insolence! Taste my rake!”
The Pilgrim was in no mood to indulge him; he raised his rod and struck straight at his head. The two of them fell to it in the middle of that mountain, in the dark of night — a fine fight indeed:
The Pilgrim’s golden pupils were as lightning; the fiend’s ringed eyes, as flowers of silver.
This one’s mouth spat coloured mist; that one’s breath poured forth red haze.
Breath pouring red haze lit the shadowed places; mouth spitting coloured mist made splendour of the night.
The gold-hooped rod, the nine-toothed rake — two heroes truly worth the praising: one a Great Sage come down to the mortal world, one a Marshal fallen to the ends of heaven.
That one, for losing his dignity, was made a monster; this one, escaped by luck from his affliction, bows to the monkish house.
The rake went out as a dragon puts forth its claws; the rod came on just as a phoenix threads the flowers.
That one cried: “To wreck a man’s marriage is to slay his father!” This one cried: “To force a young girl is to earn the rope!”
Idle words, wild clamour, and back and forth the rod fenced off the rake.
They fought and fought until the sky was near to dawn, and the fiend felt both his shoulders ache and go numb.
The two of them fought from the second watch straight through until the east grew white. The fiend could not hold his ground. Beaten, he fled, changed himself once more into a wild wind, went directly back into his cave, shut the door fast, and would not show his head again.
Outside that cave door the Pilgrim saw a stone tablet, and graven upon it were the three characters: Cloud-Ladder Cave. Seeing that the fiend would not come out, and that the day was now fully light, he thought to himself: “My master will be waiting. I had best go back and let him see me, and there will be time enough to take this fiend afterwards.” So with one touch of his foot on the cloud he was back at once at the Gao Farm.
Now Sanzang had sat talking of past and present with the several elders, and had not slept the whole night through. He was just thinking that the Pilgrim had not returned when, of a sudden, there stood the Pilgrim in the courtyard. The Pilgrim put away his iron rod, straightened his robe, and came up into the hall, calling: “Master, I am back.” In a flurry the elders bowed down together and thanked him: “Great labour, great labour!”
Sanzang asked: “Wukong, you have been gone the whole night. Where is the monster you took?”
The Pilgrim said: “Master, that fiend is no earthly goblin, nor is he a beast of the hills. He is Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds come down among men. It was only that he entered the wrong womb, so that his face and snout have the look of a wild boar; but in truth his spirit is intact. He says he takes his surname from his appearance, and is called Zhu Ganglie, Bristles the Boar. Old Sun drew out the rod in the back apartments and struck; he turned into a gust of wild wind and went off. Old Sun struck a blow into that wind, and he turned into a streak of fire and made straight back to his own mountain cave, and brought out a nine-toothed muckrake, and fought old Sun the whole night long. Just now, as the sky began to lighten, he shrank from the fight and ran, and shut his cave door fast and would not come out. Old Sun meant to break that door down and have it out with him, but feared the master would be waiting here in anxiety, and so came first to bring word.”
When he had finished, old Gao came forward and knelt down. “Elder, there is no help for it. You may have driven him off, but he will come back once you are gone, and what is to be done then? Trouble yourself, I beg, to take him for me and pull him up by the root, and then there will be no aftermath. This old man will not be slow to thank you; I shall reward you handsomely. This house and its lands — I will have all our kin and friends draw up a deed, and split them with you, Elder, share and share alike. Only cut the grass and dig out the root, and do not let my house’s good name be spoiled.”
The Pilgrim laughed. “Old man, you do not know your own measure. That fiend told me himself that although his belly is large, and he has eaten some of your family’s tea and rice, he has also done a great deal of good work for you; the wealth you have made these several years is all by his strength. He has not eaten your food for nothing. Why do you ask me to drive him away? By his own account he is a god from Heaven come down, who does the farm-work in your stead, and he has never harmed your daughter. Such a son-in-law is a fair match for your house. He has not spoiled your reputation, nor disgraced your conduct; truly, you might as well keep him.”
Old Gao said: “Elder, though he does no harm to public morals, the name of the thing is ugly to hear. At the least occasion people will say, ‘The Gao family has taken in a monster for a son-in-law.’ How is one to bear such talk?”
Sanzang said: “Wukong, since you have had one bout with him, have done and make an end, so that the thing is finished as it was begun.”
The Pilgrim said: “I was only trying him, for sport. This time I shall fetch him back for you to see. Do not fret.” And he called: “Old Gao, look well after my master, and I am off.”
No sooner had he said he would go than, formless and shadowless, he had leapt to that mountain of his and come to the cave mouth. One blow of the iron rod, and both leaves of the door were smashed to powder. He shouted abuse into it: “You chaff-swilling lout, come out and have it out with old Sun!”
The fiend was inside the cave, sleeping and puffing hard. Hearing the door struck and sounding, and hearing himself abused as a chaff-swilling lout, he could not master his rage. He had no choice but to drag out his rake, rouse himself, and come running out, railing at the top of his voice: “You Ban-horsemaster, you are a right nuisance. What is this to do with you, that you should break down my gate? Go and consult the statutes: to force an entry through a main gate is a capital offence under the miscellaneous articles.”
The Pilgrim laughed. “You idiot! Suppose I did break down the gate — I have a defence to plead. But you, who took a man’s daughter by force, with no matchmakers and no witnesses, and never a cup of tea nor a cup of wine of betrothal — you should be charged with a true capital crime, and beheaded.”
The fiend said: “Enough idle talk. Look to this rake of old Hog’s!”
The Pilgrim held it off with his rod. “Is this the rake you use as a hired hand at the Gao farm, to dig the ground and plant the greens? What is there in it to frighten me?”
The fiend said: “You mistake it. Is this rake a thing of the mortal world? Listen while I tell you.”
This was forged of the divine ice-iron; ground and polished to a finish, its brightness pure.
Lord Lao himself plied the tongs and hammer; the Fire Star in person fed in the charcoal-dust.
The Five Emperors of the Five Quarters bent their minds to it; the Six Ding and Six Jia spent their pains upon it.
They wrought its nine teeth of jade, hanging like fangs, and cast the double rings, leaves of gold pendent.
Its body is dressed with the Six Luminaries and marshalled to the Five Planets; its frame answers the four seasons and follows the eight nodes.
Its length and breadth, its high and low, fix heaven and earth; its right and left, its yin and yang, divide sun from moon.
The spirit-generals of the six lines are ranged upon it by celestial statute; the stars and constellations are set out in it after the Dipper.
It was named the Supreme-Treasure Gold-Steeped Rake, and presented to the Jade Emperor to guard the cinnabar gates.
Because I refined myself into a Great Luo immortal, it was reared for me as a companion of long life.
By decree I was made Marshal, styled the Heavenly Reeds, and the muckrake was granted me as an imperial insignia.
Lift it, and fierce flame and fine radiance rise; bring it down, and a savage wind drives auspicious snow.
The spirit-generals of the Bureau of Heaven were all of them afraid; in the Courts of Earth, King Yama’s heart and gall went cold.
Where in the mortal world is there such a weapon? In all the earth there is no iron of its kind.
It changes with my body as my heart may wish; it turns and tumbles as I please, at a word of the formula.
Hand in hand with me these many years, it has never left me; my companion these several seasons, never a day apart.
At my three meals a day it is never set aside; at night, through a whole night’s sleep, never once laid by.
It has gone with me to the Peach Assembly; it has attended court with me at the imperial gates.
All because I trusted to wine and turned to violence, all because I leaned on my strength and made a drunken scene,
Heaven cast me down into the dust of the world, and in the lower world I worked out my fill of sin.
In the stone cave my heart went wrong and I ate men; at the Gao Farm I found my pleasure and made a marriage.
This rake — put out to sea, it overturns the dragon-lizard’s den; taken up the mountain, it tears open the lair of tigers and wolves.
Speak no more of the several weapons; among them all my rake is the keenest.
To close and take the victory, where is the difficulty? To gamble the fight and win the merit needs no saying.
What care I if your head is bronze and your brains iron and your body all of steel? One stroke of the rake, and the soul is gone and the spirit leaks away.
Hearing this, the Pilgrim put away his iron rod. “Idiot, do not boast. Old Sun will stretch out this head of his right there. Strike it a blow and see whether the soul goes and the spirit leaks away.”
The fiend did indeed raise his rake, put his strength into the stroke, and brought it down with a thud; and the rake struck fire, spark upon spark, and had not shifted so much as a fraction of the scalp. It so unnerved him that his hands went numb and his feet went weak. “What a head!” he cried. “What a head!”
The Pilgrim said: “There is something you do not know. When old Sun made his uproar in Heaven, and stole the elixir, and pilfered the peaches, and made away with the imperial wine, he was taken by the Little Sage Erlang and haled before the Dipper-and-Bull Palace, where the assembled gods hewed at old Sun with axes and beat him with hammers, hacked at him with blades and stabbed at him with swords, burned him with fire and struck him with thunder — and never shifted a hair of him. Then that Most High Lord Lao had me taken and put into the eight-trigram furnace and refined in the divine fire, and refined me into fiery eyes and golden pupils, a head of bronze and arms of iron. If you doubt it, strike a few more, and see whether it hurts or does not hurt.”
The fiend said: “You monkey — I remember when you made your uproar in Heaven, your house was in the Water-Curtain Cave, on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, in the Land of Aolai, in the Eastern Continent of Superior Spirit. For years now your name has not been heard. How do you come to be here, bullying me on my own threshold? Can it be my father-in-law who went and fetched you?”
The Pilgrim said: “Your father-in-law did not go and fetch me. It is that old Sun has mended his ways and turned from the Dao to the Buddhist order, and guards an imperial younger brother of the Great Tang of the Eastern Land, one called the Master of the Law Sanzang, bound west to worship the Buddha and seek the scriptures. We passed the Gao Farm and lodged there; that old man Gao, talking, let the thing out, and begged me to save his daughter and take you, you chaff-swilling lout.”
At these words the fiend threw down his muckrake, made a deep bow with his hands clasped, and said: “Where is this scripture-seeker? I beg you take the trouble to present me.”
The Pilgrim said: “What do you want with him?”
The fiend said: “It was the Bodhisattva Guanshiyin who exhorted me to good, and I received her precepts from her, and here I have kept the fast and abstained from flesh, and she bade me follow that scripture-seeker to the Western Heaven, to worship the Buddha and seek the scriptures, that my merit might redeem my crime and I might come at last to the true fruit. She bade me wait for him these several years, and no word of him has come. Today, since you are his disciple, why did you not say at once that this was the business of the scriptures, instead of leaning on your ferocity and coming to my door to strike me?”
The Pilgrim said: “Do not play the trickster and try to soften me, thinking to make it a way of escape. If you truly mean to guard the Tang Monk, with nothing false in it, then swear an oath to Heaven, and I will take you to see my master.”
The fiend flung himself down on his knees and, bowing towards the void like a pestle in a mortar, knocked his head on the ground and said again and again: “Amitābha Buddha! Namo Buddha! If this is not my true heart and honest meaning, then let me offend against the statutes of Heaven and have my carcass hacked into ten thousand pieces.”
Seeing him swear and pledge himself, the Pilgrim said: “If it is so, then set a light to this dwelling of yours and burn it, and I will take you.” The fiend did indeed gather brushwood of reed and thorn, kindled a fire, and burned that Cloud-Ladder Cave until it looked like a broken kiln. Then he said to the Pilgrim: “I have nothing left to hinder me. Lead me away.”
The Pilgrim said: “Give me that muckrake to carry.” The fiend handed him the rake. The Pilgrim plucked out a hair, blew on it with his immortal breath, and cried: “Change!” It turned into a three-ply hempen rope. He came up and bound the fiend’s hands behind his back. The fiend really did put his hands behind him and let himself be tied as the other pleased. Then the Pilgrim took him by the ear and hauled him along, calling: “Quick march, quick march!”
The fiend said: “Gently, will you! Your hand is heavy. You are pulling till the root of my ear aches.”
The Pilgrim said: “Gently is not to be had; I cannot indulge you. As the saying goes, ‘A good pig needs hard handling.’ Wait till you have seen my master, and if your heart is true, then you shall be let go.”
So the two of them, half cloud and half mist, went straight back to the Gao Farm. There is a poem in evidence:
Metal’s nature, hard and strong, can overcome the Wood; the Mind-Monkey has subdued the Wood-Dragon and brought him home.
Metal follows, Wood complies, and the two are wholly one; Wood cleaves to Metal’s benevolence, and all is set to work.
One host, one guest, and no partition between; three crossings, three conjunctions, and a hidden subtlety within.
Nature and feeling rejoice together, the Chaste and the Primal are gathered; together they bear witness to the West, and the word is not belied.
In a moment they were before the farm. The Pilgrim, gripping the rake and holding the fiend by the ear, said: “Look who sits in state in that hall. That is my master.”
When the several kinsfolk of the Gao household, and old Gao himself, saw the Pilgrim come leading the fiend pinioned and by the ear, they came out one and all in delight to meet him in the courtyard, crying: “Elder! Elder! That is indeed our family’s son-in-law!”
The fiend went forward, dropped on both knees, and with his hands still tied behind him knocked his head before Sanzang, calling loudly: “Master, your disciple failed to meet you. Had I known my master was lodging in my father-in-law’s house, I should have come to make my bow, and been spared all this trouble.”
Sanzang said: “Wukong, how did you subdue him, that he comes to bow to me?”
Only then did the Pilgrim let go. He tapped him with the handle of the muckrake and cried: “Idiot, speak!” So the fiend set out at length the whole matter of the Bodhisattva’s exhortation.
Sanzang was greatly pleased, and called out: “Squire Gao, fetch an incense table, that we may use it.” Old Gao hastened to carry one out. Sanzang washed his hands, burned incense, bowed towards the south, and said: “How much we owe the Bodhisattva’s holy grace.” The several elders added incense too and made their bows with him.
The worship done, Sanzang went up and sat in state in the hall, and bade Wukong loose the fiend’s cords. The Pilgrim shook his body once, drew the hair back into himself, and the bonds fell away of their own accord. The fiend bowed again before Sanzang and asked to follow him westward. He bowed also to the Pilgrim, and taking him for elder brother as the one who had entered first, he called him thereafter Elder Brother.
Sanzang said: “Since you follow me in the good fruit and would be my disciple, I shall give you a religious name, that we may call you by it morning and evening.”
He said: “Master, the Bodhisattva has already laid her hand on my crown and given me the precepts and a name. I am called Zhu Wuneng, Awakened to Power.”
Sanzang laughed. “Good, good. Your elder brother is called Wukong, and you are called Wuneng. Truly you are of one lineage within my gate.”
Wuneng said: “Master, when I received the Bodhisattva’s precepts I cut off the five pungent roots and the three forbidden meats, and in my father-in-law’s house I kept the fast and abstained from flesh, and never once tasted meat. Now that I have met my master, may I break my fast?”
Sanzang said: “You may not, you may not. Since you do not eat the five pungents nor the three forbidden meats, I shall give you a second name, and call you Bajie — Eight Rules.”
The Idiot said gladly: “I shall obey my master’s command.” And so he was also called Zhu Bajie.
Seeing him thus turn from evil and return to the right, old Gao was the more delighted, and bade the house-boys lay a banquet to thank the Tang Monk.
Bajie came forward and caught hold of old Gao. “Sir, let my humble thorn come out and pay her respects to her husband’s father and her uncles. What do you say?”
The Pilgrim laughed. “Worthy brother, you have entered the Gate of the Śramaṇa and become a monk. From today, never raise that talk of a ‘humble thorn’ again. In this world there are hearth-dwelling Daoists; where is there a hearth-dwelling monk? Let us rather take our places, eat a meal of vegetarian fare, and be off early on the road to the Western Heaven.”
Old Gao set out the tables and invited Sanzang to the seat of honour; the Pilgrim and Bajie sat at his left and right, and the kinsfolk below them. Old Gao broached the vegetarian wine, filled a cup brimful, poured a libation to heaven and earth, and then offered it to Sanzang.
Sanzang said: “I will not deceive the Squire. Your poor monk was a vegetarian in the womb, and has never eaten flesh from childhood.”
Old Gao said: “Knowing the master’s purity, I have ventured no flesh. This wine too is of the pure sort; one cup can do no harm.”
Sanzang said: “Nor dare I take wine. Wine is the first of the prohibitions of our monkish house.”
Wuneng was thrown into a flurry. “Master, I have kept the fast on my own account, but I never gave up wine.”
Wukong said: “Old Sun’s capacity is small — I cannot drink a jarful — but neither did I give up wine.”
Sanzang said: “Then so be it. You brothers may take a little of the pure wine, only you shall not drink to drunkenness and spoil our business.” And so the two of them took the first round. All the rest sat down in their old places, and the vegetarian dishes were laid. There is no telling the abundance of that board, nor the richness of its dishes.
When master and disciples had done feasting, old Gao brought out on a red lacquer tray two hundred taels of loose gold and silver, and offered them to the three elders for the expenses of the road; and he brought out three cotton over-robes for outer garments as well.
Sanzang said: “We are mendicant monks. At a village we beg our rice, wherever we come we ask a meal. How should we dare take gold and silver and goods?”
The Pilgrim stepped up, swept out his hand and took a fistful, and called: “Gao Cai! Yesterday you put yourself to the trouble of bringing my master here; today we have gained a disciple, and I have nothing to thank you with. Take this odd gold and silver for your guide’s fee, and buy yourself a pair of straw sandals. Hereafter, whenever there are monsters, put a few more of them my way, and I shall have more to thank you with.” Gao Cai took it, knocked his head, and gave thanks for the gift.
Old Gao said again: “If the masters will not have gold and silver, I beg they will accept this coarse cloth with a smile, as a poor token of my heart.”
Sanzang said again: “We who have left the household, if we take so much as a thread by way of bribe, must labour a thousand kalpas to make it good. Only let us take a few of the cakes and fruit left over from the table, to serve as dry provision on the way, and that will be enough.”
Bajie said from the side: “Master, elder brother — it is all very well for you to refuse, but I have been a son-in-law in this house these several years, and the wages of my keep alone should come to three dàn. — Father-in-law! My cassock was torn by my brother last night; give me a robe of blue brocade. My shoes are burst; give me a good new pair.”
Old Gao, hearing him, did not dare refuse. He bought a pair of new shoes and an over-robe, and Bajie changed out of his old clothes.
Then Bajie went swaggering up to old Gao and made him a bow. “Convey my respects to my mother-in-law, to my elder and younger aunts, to my uncles by marriage, and to all my kin on either side. Today I go to be a monk. Forgive me that I cannot take my leave in person. Father-in-law, mind you take good care of my woman, for if we fail to fetch the scriptures I may well come back and return to the world, and be your son-in-law again as before.”
The Pilgrim shouted at him: “Lout! Do not talk nonsense.”
Bajie said: “It is not nonsense. I only fear that if something should go amiss along the way, would it not be that the monk was botched and the wife was lost, and both sides left hanging?”
Sanzang said: “Enough idle talk. Let us be off early.”
So they made up a load of baggage, and Bajie shouldered it; the white horse was saddled and Sanzang rode; the Pilgrim carried his iron rod on his shoulder and led the way in front. The three of them together took leave of old Gao and all the kinsfolk, and set off westward. There is a poem in evidence. The poem says:
The ground is full of mist and rose, the trees stand tall in colour; the Buddha’s son of the house of Tang toils bitterly on.
Hungry, he eats from one bowl the rice of a thousand houses; cold, he wears one patched robe stitched with a thousand needles.
Let the will-horse not run loose in the breast; let the mind-monkey, wayward and unruly, not be set howling.
When nature and feeling are settled and all conditions accord, the moon is full, the flower golden, and the coarse hair shed.
The three of them went forward on the westward road, and for a month or so all was quiet. They passed the borders of Ü-Tsang, and looking up of a sudden saw a high mountain. Sanzang reined in his horse and said: “Wukong, Wuneng — the mountain ahead is high. We must go carefully, very carefully.”
Bajie said: “It is nothing. This mountain is called Pagoda Mountain, and in it there lives a Crow’s Nest Chan Master, who practises here. Old Hog has met him before.”
Sanzang said: “What is his occupation?”
Bajie said: “He has some attainment in the Way. He once urged me to follow him in cultivation, but I did not go, and there was an end of it.”
As master and disciples talked, they came in no long time up onto the mountain. A fine mountain! Look at it:
On the mountain’s south are green pines and dark junipers; on the mountain’s north, willows in leaf and peaches in flower.
A clamour and a chattering: the mountain birds answer one another;
a whirling and a wheeling: the immortal cranes fly up together.
A fragrance, thick and sweet: the flowers in a thousand hues;
a green so deep it darkens: the wild grasses in ten thousand kinds.
Below the ravine are waters running green; before the cliff are clouds of blessing in drifts and clusters.
Truly the scene is a place of rare seclusion, still, with never a traveller in sight.
That master, gazing from horseback into the distance, saw before a fragrant juniper a nest of sticks and grass; on the left were elk and deer with flowers in their mouths, on the right mountain monkeys offering fruit; and in the treetops blue simurghs and painted phoenixes sang together, while black cranes and brocade pheasants gathered in a company.
Bajie pointed and said: “Is that not the Crow’s Nest Chan Master?” Sanzang put the whip to his horse and rode straight to the foot of the tree.
Now the Chan Master, seeing the three of them coming on, left his nest at once and came down from the tree. Sanzang dismounted and bowed to him, and the Chan Master raised him with his hand. “Holy monk, rise. Forgive me for not coming to meet you, forgive me.”
Bajie said: “Old Chan Master, I make my bow.”
The Chan Master asked in surprise: “Are you not Zhu Ganglie of Fuling Mountain? What great destiny is this, that you should be travelling with a holy monk?”
Bajie said: “The year before last the Bodhisattva Guanyin exhorted me to good, and I asked to follow him as a disciple.”
The Chan Master was greatly pleased. “Good, good, good!” Then, pointing at the Pilgrim, he asked: “And who is this?”
The Pilgrim laughed. “How is it that this old Chan knows him, and does not know me?”
The Chan Master said: “Because I have not had the acquaintance.” Sanzang said: “He is my eldest disciple, Sun Wukong.” The Chan Master laughed politely: “Pardon my discourtesy, pardon my discourtesy.”
Sanzang bowed again. “Might I ask how far it is to the Great Thunderclap Monastery in the Western Heaven?”
The Chan Master said: “Far, far. Only the road is thick with tigers and leopards, and hard to travel.”
Sanzang pressed him courteously and asked again: “And how far is the road in truth?”
The Chan Master said: “The road is long, yet a day must come when you arrive. It is the demon-miasmas that cannot be dispelled. I have a Heart Sutra, one scroll, fifty-four lines in all, two hundred and seventy characters. Where you meet with demon-miasmas, only recite this scripture, and of itself no harm will come to you.”
Sanzang prostrated himself on the ground and begged for it, and the Chan Master recited it aloud and transmitted it to him. The scripture says:
The Heart Sutra of the Perfection of Great Wisdom. — The Bodhisattva Who Regards the World Freely, coursing deep in the perfection of wisdom, saw then that the five aggregates are all empty, and passed beyond every suffering and affliction. Śāriputra: form is not other than emptiness, nor emptiness other than form; form is itself emptiness, and emptiness is itself form. So it is also with sensation, perception, volition and consciousness. Śāriputra: all things bear the mark of emptiness. They neither arise nor perish, are neither defiled nor pure, neither increase nor diminish. Therefore in emptiness there is no form; no sensation, perception, volition or consciousness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; no form, sound, scent, savour, touch or thing thought of; no realm of the eye, and so on to no realm of mind-consciousness; no ignorance, and no ending of ignorance. So too there is no old age and death, and no ending of old age and death. No suffering, no stilling, no cessation, no path; no wisdom, and nothing to attain.
Because there is nothing to attain, the bodhisattva, resting upon the perfection of wisdom, has a mind free of hindrance; and having no hindrance, he has nothing to fear. Far removed from all inversion and dreaming fancy, he comes at the last to nirvāṇa. The buddhas of the three times, resting upon the perfection of wisdom, attain the unexcelled, right and universal enlightenment. Know therefore that the perfection of wisdom is the great spirit-spell, the great spell of light, the unsurpassed spell, the spell that has no equal; it can cut away every suffering, in truth and not in vain. Therefore is spoken the spell of the perfection of wisdom. The spell runs thus: “Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā!”
Now the Master of the Law of the Tang had roots and origins of his own: hearing the Heart Sutra once, he could hold it in memory, and it is handed down to this day. This is the summary scripture of cultivating the real, the gate of assembly for becoming a buddha.
The Chan Master, having transmitted the text, trod the cloud-light and would have gone up to his crow’s nest. But Sanzang caught hold of him again and pressed him, determined to learn exactly what the road westward held. The Chan Master laughed and said:
The road is not hard to travel; only listen while I tell you.
A thousand hills, a thousand waters, deep; miasmas many and demons many.
When you come to the crag that touches heaven, set your heart at rest and have no fear.
When you reach the Rub-the-Ear Cliff, go sideways and feel out every step.
Take care in the Black Pine Wood, where fox-spirits often cut the road.
Sprites fill the walled cities; demon lords are lodged all over the hills.
Old tigers sit in the hall of judgment; grey wolves serve as clerks of the register.
Lions and elephants all style themselves king; tigers and leopards are the drivers of the coach.
A wild boar shoulders the carrying-pole; a water-monster is met with up ahead.
An ancient stone ape of many years — there he nurses his spite.
Ask that acquaintance of yours; he knows the road that runs west.
The Pilgrim, hearing this, laughed coldly. “We shall go on. There is no need to ask him. Ask me.” Sanzang did not take his meaning. The Chan Master turned into a golden light and went straight up to his crow’s nest.
The elder bowed his thanks towards it; but the Pilgrim’s heart swelled with rage, and he raised his iron rod and struck wildly upward. Then he saw ten thousand lotus blossoms spring forth, and an auspicious mist that wrapped it in a thousand folds. Though the Pilgrim had strength to churn the seas and overturn the rivers, he could not pull loose one strand of the nest’s creeper.
Seeing it, Sanzang caught hold of him. “Wukong, he is such a Bodhisattva as that. What do you mean by battering his nest?”
The Pilgrim said: “He cursed the two of us, my brother and me, and went off.”
Sanzang said: “He was speaking of the road to the Western Heaven. When did he curse you?”
The Pilgrim said: “What do you know of it? By ‘a wild boar shoulders the carrying-pole’ he was cursing Bajie; by ‘an ancient stone ape of many years’ he was cursing old Sun. How should you make out his meaning?”
Bajie said: “Brother, let your anger go. This Chan Master knows the affairs of past and future too. Only look to that line of his, ‘a water-monster is met with up ahead,’ and we shall see whether it proves out or not. Let him be, and let us go.”
Seeing the lotuses and the blessed mist about the nest, the Pilgrim could only ask his master to mount, and they went down the mountain and westward. And going, they went —
It will surely make pure blessing scarce among men, and set calamity and demons thick upon the hills.
In the end we do not know what really lies ahead. Listen to the next chapter, and it will be explained.
Everything he says about himself is true. The chapter stops the fight dead so that the monster can recite his autobiography, and the autobiography is the point. Thirty-two couplets, delivered in the dark with a muckrake in his hands, and the first half of it is a technically correct summary of Daoist inner alchemy — the Palace of the Muddy Pellet at the crown of the head, the Bubbling Spring in the sole of the foot, the Infant and the Fair Maid who are lead and mercury, the three flowers gathered and the five breaths turned home. He completed the work. He ascended. He was given a fleet to command on the Milky Way. Then he got drunk at a party and laid hands on the moon goddess. That join, between a real attainment and a real disgrace, is the argument of the whole passage: what he achieved bought him an office and an appetite and nothing else. And his story rhymes with Wukong’s point for point — the same banquet, the same wine, the same Venus stepping out of the ranks to plead for him, the same commuted sentence. The monkey chasing him through the dark has exactly the same file.
A badge of office, demoted to a garden tool. Wukong asks whether the rake is the one he uses to dig turnips at the Gao farm, and gets twenty-four couplets in reply. The poem is a weapon-genealogy of the kind Homer gives the shield of Achilles: forged of divine ice-iron by Lord Lao himself, with Mars in person feeding the charcoal; hung with nine teeth of jade and gold pendants shaped like leaves; matched to the Six Luminaries, the eight nodes of the solar year, the six lines of a hexagram, the Dipper. Named at court. Issued to a newly appointed Marshal as an 御節, an imperial tally of office — the badge that proves the bearer speaks for the throne. And then the fall, and the same object is a hired hand’s hoe. That is the shape of Bajie’s whole story compressed into one thing you can hold. He recites its glory to a monkey who has just called it farm equipment, and every line of the recital confirms the insult.
Two demons arguing sentencing law. Before the poem there is a quarrel, and it is conducted entirely in the language of the Ming legal code. The fiend accuses Wukong of 雜犯死罪 — a capital offence of the miscellaneous class, which in practice was the commutable kind — for forcing a gate. Of all the charges available he has chosen the one carrying the lightest penalty. Wukong concedes the act, claims a 辨處, a ground of defence, and countercharges 真犯斬罪, a true capital crime, for carrying off a girl with no matchmakers, no witnesses and no betrothal gifts. It is a mock trial fought with weapons, and it is not a digression: the entire chapter turns on whether this marriage was lawful. Squire Gao’s own objection, when it comes, is not that the son-in-law is a demon but that 名聲不甚好聽 — the name of the thing sounds bad, and people will talk.
Nobody asks the daughter. Wukong spends a long scene arguing the monster’s case, and every clause of it is true: the creature eats enormously, but he has done the work of many men, the family fortune is his doing, and he has never harmed the girl. By the measure of 門當戶對, matched gate and matched door — still the phrase a Chinese parent reaches for when sizing up a match — he is a perfectly respectable son-in-law. What defeats the argument is gossip. And when the family come running into the courtyard to see a demon led in bound and by the ear, what they recognise and shout aloud in delight is a relative: 他正是我家的女婿, that really is our family’s son-in-law. Through all of it the daughter herself, shut in the rear apartments since the chapter before, is neither seen nor heard nor consulted.
A name that is a standing telling-off. He already has a religious name when he arrives — 悟能, Wuneng, Awakened to Power, given him by Guanyin, and it sits neatly beside 悟空, Wukong, Awakened to Emptiness. What he wants is dinner. He explains, quite truthfully, that he has kept a strict fast for years in his cave, and asks whether he may now stop. Sanzang answers by giving him a second name, 八戒, Bajie, the Eight Prohibitions — the eight precepts a lay Buddhist takes on for a fast-day — so that the refusal will be spoken aloud every time anybody addresses him for the rest of his life. He accepts it 歡歡喜喜, delightedly. The name the whole world knows him by is a permanent reprimand, and he has never once minded.
The invoice, the fistful and the refusal. Three attitudes to money in the space of two pages, and the novel declines to rank them. Sanzang refuses two hundred taels on a lacquer tray with impeccable correctness, explaining that a bribe the width of a silk thread costs a thousand ages of cultivation to work off — and then accepts the cold leftovers from the table. Wukong reaches in without a word, takes a handful, and hands it straight to Gao Cai, the servant who did the actual work of fetching them, telling him to buy a pair of straw sandals with it and to send a few more monsters his way in future. Bajie submits an invoice: he has worked the farm for years, the board and keep of a hired hand come to three dàn of grain — a measure of bulk, not a weight, and some three hundred litres of it — his gown is torn and his shoes have burst along the seam. Old Gao, who has just been told his money is spiritually ruinous, does not dare refuse a line of it.
The sutra that miscounts itself. The Crow’s Nest Chan Master will not tell Sanzang how far it is to the Western Heaven — 遠哩，遠哩, far, far, and nothing more — and gives him a text instead. It is the longest quotation of a canonical scripture anywhere in the novel, and it arrives at exactly the right moment: the party is one member short of complete, and it has just been handed the one thing it will carry the entire way. Two details are worth knowing. First, the bibliography does not match the body. He announces fifty-four lines and two hundred and seventy characters; the sutra as this edition prints it runs to two hundred and sixty characters and fifty clauses. Second, the standard text negates the Four Noble Truths in a row — suffering, arising, cessation, path — and this edition writes 寂, stilling, where that text has 集, arising. We print what the edition prints. And listen for one word: 罣礙, hindrance, the thing that snags and holds you up. Bajie used it earlier in the chapter, standing in front of his burnt-out cave, saying he had nothing left to hinder him. He was quoting the Heart Sutra, and nobody in the chapter knows it.
The prophecy insults the audience. The Chan Master’s parting verse is a table of contents for the rest of the book. Rub-the-Ear Crag, so narrow your ear scrapes the rock; the Black Pine Wood where foxes commit highway robbery; sprites filling the walled cities; tigers sitting on the magistrate’s bench and wolves keeping the county registers, which is a joke the novel never tires of. Every creature on the list will be met in person. Then the last few lines turn and face the audience: 野豬挑擔子, a wild boar shoulders the carrying-pole, and 多年老石猴，那裡懷嗔怒, an ancient stone ape nurses his spite. Bajie is standing right there holding the baggage. Wukong takes it as an insult and proves the line correct within the minute by trying to smash the man’s house — at which the nest sprouts ten thousand lotuses and cannot be touched. And it is the Idiot, freshly described in public as a beast of burden, who works out the one piece of sound reasoning in the chapter: if the abuse is accurate, so is the rest, which makes the water-monster up ahead worth taking seriously rather than resenting.