by Unknown
Bowing again and again to thank him, Pilgrim said, “I am grateful to the Old Grandpa for his instructions. But I cannot possibly give up my search!” He was about to pour out the rice that he took from the village in the south to give to the old man so that he could put away the empty bowl when the old man lay down his staff and took away the alms bowl. All at once the houseboy and the old man both revealed their true forms and went to their knees to kowtow. “Great Sage,” they cried in unison, “these humble deities dare not hide anything from you. We are the mountain god and the local spirit of this region, and we have come to receive you here. Let us keep the bowl and the rice for the moment, so that the Great Sage can exercise his power. When the Tang Monk is rescued, the rice will then be presented to him and he will appreciate what reverence and devotion the Great Sage has shown him.”
“You are asking to be beaten, clumsy ghosts!” bellowed Pilgrim. “If you knew that I had arrived, why didn’t you show up earlier to meet me? Why must you come in shabby disguises?” “The Great Sage is rather impetuous,” said the local spirit, “and this humble deity dares not confront you directly. That’s why we camouflage ourselves to report to you.” Calming down more and more, Pilgrim said, “I’ll only make a note of your beating this time! Take care of that alms bowl for me, and let me go and catch that monster-spirit.” The local spirit and the mountain god obeyed.
Tightening his sash on his tiger-skin kilt which he hitched up, our Great Sage dashed into the mountain to look for the fiend’s cave, holding high his golden-hooped rod. He passed one of the cliffs and saw more strange boulders and two stone doors just beneath a green ledge. In front of the doors were many little imps, wielding lances and waving swords. Truly there were
Mists in auspicious folds;
Moss in bluish clumps;
Strange rugged rocks stood in array;
Rough winding paths coiled round and round.
Apes cried and birds sang in this lovely scene;
Phoenixes, male and female, danced as in Peng-Ying.5
A few plums, facing the east, began to bloom;
Warmed by the sun, the bamboos displayed their green.
Beneath the steep ridge—
Within the deep brook—
Beneath the steep ridge snow piled high like powder;
Within the deep brook water froze as ice.
Pines and cedars fresh for a thousand years;
Bunches of mountain tea all glowing red.
As he did not go there merely to admire the scenery, our Great Sage strode up to the doors and cried out in a severe voice, “Little imps! Go inside quickly and tell your cave master that I am Sun Wukong, the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven, and the disciple of the holy monk from the Tang court. Tell him to send out my master quickly so that all of your lives may be spared.”
That group of fiends dashed inside to report, “Great King, there is a hairy-faced priest with a curved beak outside. He calls himself Sun Wukong, the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven, and he has come to demand the return of his master.” When he heard this announcement, the demon king was delighted. “I wanted him to come!” he said. “Since I left my former palace and descended to earth, I have never had a chance to practice martial art. Today he is here and he will be a worthy opponent.” He gave the order at once for his weapon to be brought out, and every one of those fiends, young and old, in the cave aroused himself. They hurriedly hauled out a twelve-foot-long spotted-steel lance to present to the old fiend. Then the old fiend gave this order: “Little ones, all of you must follow orders. Those who advance will be rewarded; those who retreat will be executed.” The fiends all obeyed and followed the old demon, who, when he walked out of the cave, asked aloud, “Who is Sun Wukong?” On one side Pilgrim took a look at that demon king and saw that he was ugly and ferocious indeed:
A jagged, single horn;
A pair of gleaming eyes;
Coarse skin swelling up from his head;
Dark flesh glowing beneath his ears.
A long tongue oft’ licking his nose;
A wide mouth full of yellow teeth.
His hide is like indigo blue;
His tendons are tough as steel.
Rhino-like, though he can’t light up the stream;6
Steer-like, though he can’t plow the fields.
He has no use at all for tilling the soil,
Though he has the strength to shake Heav’n and Earth.
His two dyed-blue hands with tendons brown
Grasp firmly the long, straight, spotted-steel lance.
You’ll see why, if you stare at his fierce form,
He’s called Great King One-Horned Buffalo.
Pilgrim Sun walked up to him and said, “Your Grandpa Sun is here! Give me back my master quickly, and you will suffer no harm. Utter but half a ‘No,’ and I’ll see to it that you die faster than you can select your burial ground!” “You audacious, brazen monkey-spirit!” shouted the demon. “What abilities do you have that you dare indulge in such tall talk?” “You brazen fiend,” said Pilgrim, “it’s only you who has never seen the abilities of old Monkey!” The demon said, “Your master stole some garments of mine and I caught him all right. And now I am just about to have him steamed and eaten. What kind of a warrior are you that you dare demand his return at my door?” “My master is an honest and upright priest,” said Pilgrim. “It’s impossible that he should want to steal things from a fiend like you!” The demon replied, “I created an immortal village beside the mountain, and your master sneaked into one of the buildings. What he saw he coveted, and he took three of my vests of silk brocade and put them on. I had proof derived from both the stolen goods and witnesses, and that was why I seized him. If you indeed are able, you should try your hand with me. If you can withstand me for three rounds, I will spare your master’s life. If you can’t, I’ll send you to the Region of Darkness!”
With a laugh, Pilgrim said, “Brazen creature! No need for this bravado! If you speak of trying my hand, you are after old Monkey’s own heart. Come up here and have a taste of my rod!” The fiendish creature, of course, was in no wise afraid of any combat. Raising his lance, he stabbed at Pilgrim’s face. This was quite a marvelous battle! Look at
The golden-hooped rod upraised—
The long-shaft ed lance going out—
The golden-hooped rod upraised
Is brilliant as the golden snakes of lightning.
The long-shaft ed lance going out
Is radiant like a dragon leaving the ink-dark sea.
The little imps beat the drums before the door
As they spread in formation to help the fight.
Over here our Great Sage uses his might
To reveal, back and forth, his abilities.
On that side there is a lance,
Alert and spirited;
On our side there is a rod—
Such lofty art of combat!
Truly a hero has met a hero true;
A foe has found another worthy foe.
That demon king belches purple breath like lightning coils;
This Great Sage’s eyes flash forth rays like brocade clouds.
Because a Great Tang Monk faces an ordeal,
They, without forbearance, strive bitterly.
Closing again and again for more than thirty times, they could not reach a decision. When that demon king saw how perfect Wukong’s style was in using his rod, how there was not even the slightest false move, he was so pleased that he shouted bravos repeatedly, saying, “Marvelous ape! Marvelous ape! Truly abilities like these are worthy to cause havoc in Heaven!” That Great Sage, too, was also pleased by the methodical way in which the demon king wielded his lance: as he parried left and right, every blow and every thrust were in perfect form. “Marvelous spirit! Marvelous spirit!” cried the Great Sage also. “Truly a demon capable of stealing elixir!” The two of them therefore fought for twenty more rounds.
Using the tip of his lance to point at the ground, the demo
n king shouted for the little imps to attack together. All those brazen fiends, wielding swords, scimitars, staffs, and spears, rushed forward at once and surrounded the Great Sage Sun completely. Entirely undaunted, Pilgrim only cried, “Welcome! Welcome! That’s exactly what I want!” He used his golden-hooped rod to cover his front and back, to parry blows east and west, but that gang of fiends refused to be beaten back. Growing more agitated, Pilgrim tossed his rod up into the air, shouting, “Change!” It changed immediately into iron rods by the hundreds and thousands; like flying snakes and soaring serpents, they descended onto the fiends from the air. When those monster-spirits saw this, everyone was frightened out of his wits. Covering their heads and necks, they fled toward their cave for their lives. The old demon king, however, stood still and, laughing with scorn, said, “Monkey, don’t be impertinent! Watch my trick!” He at once took out from his sleeve a white, shiny fillet and tossed it up in the air, crying, “Hit!” With a swish, all the iron rods changed back into a single rod, which was then sucked up by the fillet. The Great Sage Sun, completely empty-handed, had to use his somersault desperately in order to escape with his life. Thus
The demon, in victory, returned to his cave,
But Pilgrim, in a daze, knew not what to do.
Truly it is that
The Dao is one foot but demons are ten feet tall.
Nature reels, feelings faint—the wrong home you find.
Dharma-self, alas, has no proper seat:
His act that time stems from a faulty mind!
We do not know what is the end of all this; let’s listen to the explanation in the next chapter.
Notes
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
1. The first two lines of this poem are built on ideographic elements of the two Chinese graphs, ren and nai , which mean patience. In addition, the graph ren is made of two words: ren , meaning a knife or sword, and xin , meaning the heart or mind. The second graph, nai, is also made of two words: er , meaning and/or nevertheless, and cun , meaning an inch. The second line of the poem thus reads, literally, “in your conduct remember the ‘nevertheless’ beside the ‘inch.’” Since this is nonsense in English, I have translated the line with analogies.
2. “The noblest”: literally, the “highest type of scholar (shangshi ),” an allusion to the Daodejing 41.
3. “The sage loves virtue”: an allusion to Analects 4. 11, where the line actually reads, “the princely man or gentleman thinks constantly of virtue .”
4. This episode relates Sun Wukong’s extended tour of the three famous paradisiacal islands of Chinese mythology that are thought to be found in the Eastern Ocean or Eastern Sea . See entry on “Penglai” in ET 2: 788–90.
5. Eight Rules is punning here on the word qing , a sonorous stone used for religious rituals. Another phoneme, qing , means festivity or celebration.
6. According to the “Classic of West Mountain ” in the Classic of Mountain and Sea , the “jade cream ” comes bubbling and gushing out of a river flowing from a certain Mount Mi . The mythic Yellow Emperor drank it himself and used it for sacrifices. See Shanhaijing jiaozhu , ed. and annotated Yuan Ke (Shanghai, 1980), p. 41; Rémi Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie et l’ethnologie de la Chine ancienne, Traduction annotée du Shanhai jing (2 vols. Paris: Collège de France, 1983), 1: 80–81.
7. Treading the Dipper: the XYJ text here literally reads, “he wore a silk head wrap spread with the dipper stars ,” but the word “spread, bu ,” is homophonous with bu (to walk, tread, or pace), and I have read the line according to this sense of the word. The movements implied are all actions crucial to certain Daoist rituals of walking or dancing to cosmic patterns, including those of the constellations and planets. See the entry on “Bugang or ,” in ET 1: 237–38.
8. Dongfang Shuo : reputed to be a favorite court-jester in the reign of Han Wudi (r. 141–87). Even in his lifetime, Dongfang was nicknamed “zhexian, or banished immortal.” He suffered this fate because, like the Monkey in our present novel, he stole peaches from the Lady Queen Mother of the West. Accounts of his exploits could be found in both canonical history (i.e., the Records of the Historian , j 126, and Hanshu, j 65) and other anecdotal or noncanonical writings. In late centuries, a series of stage works further dramatized his story. See the entry under his name in ET 1: 366–67.
9. Pearl tree: a mythical tree found in the land of immortals, with the wood of the trunk like that of cedar but with leaves of pearl.
10. Red steel: gunwu , a kind of red steel the name of which is derived from kunwu . A sword made of this steel can “slice through jade as if it were mud,” according to the Liezi , 5.
11. Gourd-held scene: literally, the scene within the gourd, huzhong jing . The gourd, or hulu, is often used for a bottle, flask, vase, or container of drugs and liquids for medicinal and alchemical purposes. Fortune-tellers also use the gourd to store their divinitory sticks or dices. Metaphorically, the gourd also refers to the cave or grotto-heaven, dongtian , where adepts and recluses reside and practice their art. “The scene within the gourd” thus serves further as a metaphor for another realm, a transcendent world accessible only through esoteric action.
12. A book’s one . . . leaf: literally, yipin , a highest class or a single grade. But the word pin can also refer to varga, a division of a sūtra or of the Buddhist canon. This latter meaning seems more appropriate in the present context.
13. Four Noble Truths: literally, in Chinese, sisheng would likely refer to the four sages or four kinds of holy men—śravakas, pratyeka-buddhas, bodhisattvas, and buddhas. If this is the reference here, the poetic line would read something like: “When the four sages are taught [shou ], they will hear right fruit.” But sisheng can also refer to sishengdi or catvāri ārya-satyāni, the four cardinal doctrines of Buddhism on suffering, its causes, its end, and its deliverance. I have chosen the second meaning for the translation here.
14. Six stages: the different options of rebirth for ordinary mortals.
15. Young grove: in Chinese, shaolin , a term naming a famous Buddhist monastery on Mount Song () in the Dengfeng County () of modern Henan () province, established during the end of the fifth century. Buddhist lore recounts how Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Chan Buddhism, accomplished his incomparable feat of meditation facing a wall on site for nine years. Bodhidharma in popular legends was also honored as the patriarch of a particular form of martial arts, pitting bare fists or bamboo rods and wooden staffs against metal weapons. In later centuries, three other monasteries with the same name were allegedly founded in the southeastern coastal regions. Although popular fiction celebrates all four temples as centers of the Shaolin tradition of martial arts, the Henan location was indisputably the official one, being so designated and honored in contemporary China. A legend told through the centuries relates how “monk soldiers ()” were led to victory by one Vajrapāṇi (wielder of the thunderbolt), and this may indicate progressive association with Avalokiteśvara, the Indian and Tibetan Guanyin. For discussion of Guanyin’s relations to Chan, see Yü, passim., but esp. pp. 360–64 on the cult of Guanyin in the coastal region of Hangzhou. For an authoritative study of the monastery, see Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion and the Chinese Martial Arts (Honolulu, 2008).
16. Jade-browed: yuaho , the jade-white curls, ūrnā, between the eyebrows of Buddha himself from which he beams forth to all the world his illuminating light, but here, the poem has given this physical mark of sacrality to Guanyin as well.
17. A self which can do: youwei shen . This line is supposed to depict a Buddhist deity, but it actually invokes Quanzhen language. Building from their understanding of Laozi’s famous doctrine on no- or nonaction, wuwei , the Quanzhen masters went on to emphasize in their teachings the ability to do and to act: youzuo, youwei , , because so much of their alchemical activity consisted in galvanizing the mental and physiological processes. Thus the patriarch Zhang Boduan wrote in Poem 42 of the “Wuzhen pian ” in Xiuzhen shishu (DZ 263, 4: 7
33–34): “, (If you only see not doing as most marvelous, / How could you know doing is the foundation?).”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
1. Haitong : Chinese flowering apple, malus spectabilis.
2. A quotation from Analects 4. 19.
3. “Magic of Releasing the Corpse”: the XYJ text uses perhaps a deliberately modified term of “jieshi fa ,” which simply inverts the common term, shijie . This nomenclature most familiar to students of Daoism is also one of the most puzzling, and its meaning has yet to be completely explored and understood in ongoing scholarship. The term may be translated as “release or deliverance by means of a corpse [or something like a corpse],” and the general meaning stems from the long-held conviction by Daoists that when a transcendent departs this world, his true spirit may leave but the corporal form left behind may or may not be his physical body. It may look like a corpse, but it may also be something else (i.e., a transformed object) used or appropriated by the person attaining realized immortality. As Ge Hong (283–343 CE) wrote in Baopu zi , j 2, 6a (SBBY), the term has to do with the meaning of how the human body is “exuviated or sloughed off (shuiyi ).” The creature frequently implicated in the metaphor is the cicada that casts its shell (i.e., chanshui ), invoked to indicate how death separates the form from the spirit (xingshen fenli ) or in different transformation (fenhua ). See SCC, 2 (1974): 141; 5/2 (1983): 106; Campany, pp. 52–60, and entry on “shijie” in ET 2: 896–97. The different interpretations of the concept runs through many texts of the Daoist Canon, but the most extensive discussion of the term in medieval Daoism I know of is found in the relevant sections of Yunji qiqian , j 84–86 in DZ 22: 593–608, where the various substitutes for the physical body range from artifacts like a sword and a staff to natural elements like fire and water. This group of texts so titled in the Canon was compiled by Zhang Junfang (961–1042?) as a tribute to the Song emperor Zhenzong.
4. Pengzu , the Methuselah of China. An official in the reign of the lengendary King Yao (ca. third century BCE), he was supposed to have lived for over 800 years.