by Wu Cheng-En
Seeing the evil spirit roped and in chains there Pig raised his rake to strike him and said abusively, “Evil beast, take this from me.”
Monkey held him back, saying, “Spare his life, brother, out of consideration for Ao Shun and his son.”
Mo'ang then bowed and said, “Great Sage, I must not stay here any longer. As I have rescued your master I shall now take this wretch to see my father. You have spared him the death penalty, but my father will not let him off other kinds of punishment. When he has been sentenced he will be sent back to apologize to you again.”
“Very well then,” said Monkey, “take him away. Give my respects to your father and tell him that I'll be back to thank him in person another time.” The prince then plunged into the water with his prisoner and took his ocean troops straight back to be Western Sea.
The God of the Black River then thanked Brother Monkey for the recovery of his water palace. “Disciple,” said the Tang Priest, “we're still on the Eastern bank. How are we going to get across this river?”
“Don't worry about that, my lord,” said the river god. “Please mount your horse and I will lead you across the river.” The master then rode his horse while Pig led it, Friar Sand carried the luggage, and Monkey supported Sanzang. The river god did water-stopping magic to hold the waters back. In an instant a broad road opened up where the waters had withdrawn; master and disciples crossed to the West bank, climbed it, thanked the river god, and continued on their way. Indeed:
To visit the West the priest they did save;
When the river was crossed there was never a wave.
If you don't know how they visited the Buddha and obtained the scriptures, listen to the explanation in the next installment.
Chapter 44
Evil in the Heart's Centre Crosses
the Backbone Pass
There is a poem that goes:
They travel West escaping dangers to seek the scriptures;
Nor can they stop at all the famous mountains.
They press on night and day, starting crows and hares;
The seasons turn amid falling blossom and bird-song.
In the dust under one's eyes are three thousand worlds;
Four hundred prefectures rest on the head of a staff.
Sleeping in dew and dining on wind they climb the purple slope;
Never knowing when they will be able to start back.
The story tells how after the dragon prince had subdued the demon and the God of the Black River had divided the waters, master and disciples crossed the Black River and took the main trail West. They faced wind and snow, and traveled under the moon and the stars. After they had been going for a long time it was early spring again.
The sun returns;
All comes back to life.
The sun returns;
Beauty fills the sky like an opened scroll.
All comes hack to life,
As flowers cover the earth with embroidered cushions.
A few snowflakes of plum blossom remain,
While the wheat spreads like a sea of cloud.
In the gentle thaw the mountain spring now flows,
The new shoots grow and cover the burnt-out stubble.
Tai Hao governs the East,
The Wood God rules the dawn.
Above the fragrance and the warming breeze
The clouds disperse and the sun shines anew.
Willows spread their green beside the path,
Enriching rain brings spring to all that lives.
Master and disciples were ambling along enjoying the view when all of a sudden they heard a mighty shout like a war-cry from a thousand throats. Sanzang was terrified. He reined in his horse, unable to take another step forward. “Wukong,” he said, looking back at him, “where is that noise from?”
“It sounded like an earthquake or a landslide,” said Pig.
“Or thunder,” said Friar Sand.
“Or people shouting and horses neighing,” said Sanzang.
“You're all wrong,” laughed Monkey. “Just wait a moment while I go and take a look.”
Splendid Monkey. With one bound he was on a cloud and up in the air looking all around. In the distance he could make out a walled city, and when he went close he could see that it had a haze of auspicious light over it with no sign of any evil emanations. “It's a good place,” he sighed to himself, “but why was there that terrible noise? I can't see war banners or spears there, and there's no sound of cannon. So why was there a noise like shouting and neighing?”
Just as he was debating all this with himself he noticed a big crowd of Buddhist monks on a sandbank outside the city gates, pulling a cart. The noise that had startle Sanzang was them all shouting. “King Powerful Bodhisattva.”
When he slowly lowered his cloud for a better look he saw that the cart was loaded with kiln bricks, tiles, wood and adobe bricks. Above the sandbank was a high ridge, along the top of which ran a narrow track between two great gates. Below the gates the paths all went straight down the steep sides of the ridge: the cart could not possibly be pulled up there. Although the weather was so mild and pleasant the monks were all dressed in rags and looked thoroughly poverty-stricken.
“I suppose they must be building a monastery,” thought Monkey, “and are having to do the work themselves because it's harvest-time here and they can't hire any labor.” He was still not sure when he saw two young Taoist priests come swaggering out through the city gates. Just see how they were dressed:
Star crowns on their heads,
Brocade and embroidered clothes.
The star crowns on their heads shine bright,
The brocade and embroidered clothes float like sunset clouds.
On their feet are cloud-treading shoes,
Round their waists are silken belts.
Handsome and clever faces, round as the moon;
Bodies as elegant as the immortals in Heaven.
The approach of the Taoists made the Buddhist monks all shake with fear as they redoubled their efforts and pulled harder than ever at the cart.
“Ah!” thought Monkey as he realized what was up. “The monks must be scared of the Taoists. Why else would they be pulling so hard? I've heard people tell of a place on the way to the West where they believe in Taoism and persecute Buddhist monks. This must be it. I was going to report back to the master, but he'll be angry with me if I don't discover what it's all about. He'll say that a clever chap like me ought to be able to find out the truth. I'll go down and ask what's happening so I can tell the master.”
But whom was he to ask? The splendid Great Sage shook himself and turned into the likeness of a wandering Quanzhen Taoist with a food basket over his left arm as he beat on a bamboo drum and sang Taoist songs. Monkey walked towards the city gates and bowed in greeting to the two Taoists, saying, “Humble greetings, elders in the Way.”
“Where are you from, sir?” the Taoists asked, returning his greeting.
“I wander and roam from the corners of the sea to the edge of the sky,” Monkey replied. “I am here today to beg from some pious household. Could you two elders tell me which streets and which alleys in this city love the Way and its followers? I would like to beg for some food.”
“What a depressing way to talk, sir,” said one of the Taoist priests with a laugh.
“What's so depressing about it?” Monkey asked.
“Isn't it depressing that you want to beg for food?” asked the priest.
“But we men of religion have to live by begging,” said Brother Monkey. If we don't, we can't buy our food.”
The Taoist priest laughed again and replied, “You're a stranger here and you don't know about our city. Here it's not just the civil and military officials, the rich and the elderly who love the Way and its followers. Young and old, men and women alike, everyone offers us food when they see us. But all that is hardly worth mentioning. By far the most important thing is that His Majesty the king is a devout lover of the Way an
d its followers.”
“I'm young,” said Monkey, “and I'm a stranger from far away. I didn't know that. Could I trouble you two elders to do a fellow-believer a favour? Tell me more about what this place is called and how the king shows his love for the Way and its worthies.”
“This country is called Tarrycart,” the Taoist priest replied, “and His Majesty is close to us.”
When Monkey heard this he said with a chuckle, “Can it be that a Taoist priest is monarch?”
“No,” he replied. “For twenty years there was a drought here, and not a drop of rain fell. Nothing could grow. Everyone-king, ministers, commoners, the high and the humble-all bathed, burnt incense and prayed to Heaven for rain. When they were in really desperate straits three immortals were sent from Heaven to save all living beings.”
“Which three?” Monkey asked.
“Our masters,” the Taoist priest replied.
“May I ask their titles?” Monkey asked. “Our senior master is the Great Immortal Tiger Power,” the Taoist replied, “our second master is the Great Immortal Deer Power, and the third master is the Great Immortal Antelope Power.”
“What sort of magic can your three masters perform?” Monkey asked.
“They can summon up wind and rain with a flick of the hand,” the Taoist said, “and change water into oil or stone into gold as easily as turning around. Their magic arts enable them to control the creation of heaven and earth, or to alter the positions of the stars. Our king and his ministers treat them with great respect and they are now relations of ours.”
“Your king is very fortunate,” said Monkey. “As the saying goes, magic moves ruler and minister alike. If your masters have those powers and the king treats them as his relations they must have been very good to him. Oh dear! I don't suppose that a poor Taoist like myself is fated to meet your venerable masters.”
“No, problem about meeting them,” said the Taoist. “We two are his favorite disciples. Besides, our masters are such lovers of the Way and its followers that they only need to hear the word 'Way' to come right outside to welcome a visitor. For us to take you in there would be as easy as blowing away ashes.”
Monkey chanted a deep and respectful “re-e-er” and then said, “I would be very grateful for an introduction. Let's go in.”
“Wait a moment,” said the Taoist. “You sit here while we finish the jobs we have to do, then we'll go in together.”
“Priests ought to be completely free and unconstrained,” said Monkey. “What jobs do you have to do?”
The Taoist pointed toward the Buddhist monks on the sandbank and said, “They're working for us, and we have to call the roll to make sure they don't start slacking.”
“You elders have got it wrong,” said Monkey with a smile. “We Buddhist and Taoist monks are all men of religion. They shouldn't be working for us and answering roll-calls.”
“You wouldn't know that when we were all praying for ram the year the Buddhists were on one side praying to Buddha while we were on the other side praying to the Great Bear. We both asked the court for grain, but the Buddhists turned out to be useless. They got no results by reciting their sutras and didn't help in the least. It was our masters who came along, called up wind and rain, and saved the people from their distress. The king was so angry with those useless Buddhists that he had their monasteries torn down and their Buddha-statues smashed. He revoked their ordination licenses and refused to let them go home. Instead he gave them to us to work for us as slaves. They do all our cooking and cleaning and they look after our gates. Because our residence out here hasn't been finished yet we've made the Buddhists drag the bricks, tiles and timber here to do the building for us. We two have been sent here to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't start slacking.”
When Monkey heard this he held on to them and said through his tears, “I said I wasn't fated to meet your masters and I was right.”
“Why won't you meet them?” the Taoist asked.
“I have come here on my wanderings for two reasons,” said Monkey. “One is to make a living, and the other is to find a relation.”
“What relation?” the Taoist asked.
“I have an uncle,” Monkey replied, “who left home to have his head shaved and become a Buddhist monk when he was very young. During a famine years ago he went away to beg. He hasn't been back since, and I'm looking for him out of a sense of duty to our forebears. I expect he's been detained here and can't escape, but there's no way of knowing. If I could just have a look for him and see him I'd be able to go into town with you after that.”
“No problem,” said the Taoist. “We'll sit here while you go down to the sand and check them over for us. Just make sure there are five hundred of them. See if your uncle is among them. If he is, we'll release him as you're a fellow Taoist. Then we can go into town together.”
Monkey was very grateful indeed. He bowed to them with his hands raised and headed straight for the sandbank, playing his bamboo drum. Once he was through the two sets of gates and had gone down the ridge the monks all knelt and kowtowed to him.
“Master,” one of the monks said, “we're not slacking. Every one of the five hundred of us is here and all pulling that cart.”
At this Monkey smiled to himself and thought with a grin he did not show, “Those Taoists have got them so scared that they're even frightened of an imitation Taoist like me. If I were a real Taoist they'd die of fright.”
Then Monkey said aloud with a wave of his hands, “Don't kneel, and don't be afraid. I'm not the supervisor. I'm here to look for a relation.” Once they heard him talk about looking for a relation, the monks all crowded round, craning forward, coughing and making other noises in their eagerness to be picked out.
“Who's his relation?” they all wondered. Monkey looked them all over for a while then started chuckling aloud.
“My lord,” the monk said, “if you can't find your relation among us, what is there to laugh about?”
“Do you know why I'm laughing?” Monkey asked. “It's because all you monks are failures. You were born under unlucky stars. Your parents were only prepared to let you become monks because you brought them bad luck or because you were destined to have no sisters. Why ever are you working for Taoists like slaves instead of honoring the Three Treasures, respecting the Buddha's Dharma, reading sutras and performing ceremonies of repentance?”
“You put us to shame, my lord,” the monk replied. “You must be a stranger here, sir, who doesn't understand the situation.”
“Indeed I am,” Monkey replied, “and indeed I don't.”
“Our king,” said the Buddhist monk in tears, “is prejudiced and unreasonable. He only likes the followers of Lao Zi, and he hates us Buddhists.”
“Why?” Monkey asked.
“Because three immortals came here to call up wind and rain,” the monk replied. “They ruined everything for us and won the king's confidence. He has destroyed our monasteries, revoked our ordination licenses, and refused to let us return to our homes. And the form of forced labor he imposed on us was to give us to the immortals to work for them. It's unbearably hard. When you come here, wandering Taoist, you will only have to call on the king to be richly rewarded. But any Buddhist monk who comes, whether from around here or from far away, is arrested and put to work for the immortals.”
“I suppose the Taoists must use some magic powers to worm their way into the king's confidence,” said Monkey. “Calling up winds and rain is small-time magic used by unorthodox sects, and hardly enough to win a king's heart.”
“They can refine mercury from cinnabar, sit in meditation, turn water into oil, and change stones into gold,” the monk replied. “They have now built a Temple of the Three Pure Ones where they read scriptures and perform ceremonies to heaven and earth night and day to obtain eternal life for His Majesty. That is why the king's heart has been moved.”
“So it's like that, is it?” said Monkey. “You may all go now.”
“But, my lord, we can't get away,” the monk replied. “The immortals persuaded the king to have pictures of monks painted, and these have been sent to be displayed in every ward and by every river. Tarrycart is a big country, but in every city, prefecture, county town, village, hamlet, inn and market-place there hangs a picture of Buddhist monks with this notice on it in the king's own handwriting:
Any official who captures a monk will be promoted three grades. Any commoner not holding office who captures a monk will receive a reward of fifty ounces of silver.
That's why we can't escape. It's not just us Buddhist monks. Anyone who's had a short haircut or who's bald or whose hair is thinning finds it hard not to get arrested. Agents and policemen are everywhere. There's no way we can possibly escape. We have no choice: we can only suffer here.”
“In that case you'd all better die,” said Monkey.
“My lord,” said the Buddhist monk, “many of us have already. There were over two thousand of us altogether, both us local monks and those arrested from elsewhere. Six or seven hundred of us have died and about the same number have killed themselves because they could not bear the pain, the searing heat, the bitter cold, or the local conditions. We five hundred are the only survivors.”
“How have you managed to stay alive?” Monkey asked.
“The rope broke when we tried to hang ourselves, or it did not even hurt when we tried to slit our own throats, or we floated and did not drown when we jumped into the river, or the poison we took didn't harm us.”
“You're all very lucky then,” said Monkey. “Heaven has given each of you perpetual life.”
“Sir,” said the monk, “you've left one word out. It's a perpetual life sentence. For our three meals every day all we get is a thin gruel of brown rice. At night we have to sleep on the sandbank in the open. Luckily spirits come to protect us when we close our eyes.”