The capture, when it comes, is deliberately anticlimactic — and that is the point. After the dazzling duel, the headlong chase, and the parade of brilliant transformations, the Great Sage is brought down not by any feat of arms but by a ring dropped on his head from above while his back is turned, and then by a dog. The blow comes "from the sky" (天上墜下), from entirely outside the contest he was winning on his own terms; "intent only on his hard fight with the Seven Sages," he "never knew" it was coming. There is no glory in it for anyone — not for Laozi, who simply lets go of the bangle, nor for Erlang, whose hound does the rest. The monkey who could not be beaten in fair fight is undone by what he could not see and could not fight, and the deflationary manner of it is exactly calculated: the irrepressible self is not conquered, only caught off guard.

Wú Chéng'ēn keeps the comedy alive to the very last instant. Felled by a magic ring and a dog's teeth, sprawled on the ground and about to be trussed, the monkey still finds breath to curse the hound for biting the wrong person — "instead of pestering your own master, you come and bite old Sun!" It is the perfect note on which to end his rampage: not a tragic fall but an indignant squawk, the inextinguishable cheek of the creature running on even as the ropes go around him. The detail of the 琵琶骨, the "lute-bones," is the grim functional close — in the lore of the novel, a blade run through the scapulae seals a shape-shifter's power, and with it the monkey's transformations, the very engine of his freedom and of this whole chapter, are at last stopped.

In the allegory the manner of the capture is everything. The mind-monkey has been defined throughout as the principle of restless transformation, the consciousness that slips every form; and the chapter has shown, step by step, that such a thing cannot be overpowered (the duel was a draw), cannot be outrun (the chase failed), and can only be located, not held, by clear seeing (the mirror). What finally binds it is a snare that descends from above, from a level higher than the contest itself — and then the piercing of the "lute-bones" that fixes the shape-shifter in a single form. The reading is precise: the unruly mind is subdued not by force from within the struggle but by a power that comes from outside and above it, and its subduing consists exactly in being held to one shape, no longer able to transform. This is the pattern the novel will complete two chapters hence, when the Buddha's palm — not striking, only enclosing — pins the monkey under the Mountain of Five Phases for five hundred years. The ring through the bones here is the first sealing; the mountain is the second; and only after both, and the long imprisonment between, can the mind be not merely bound but turned — set on the road West toward its own awakening. (On the 琵琶骨 and the sealing of shape-shifters, and on Erlang's hound, see the notes; the bangle will return many times in the pilgrimage to come.)