The Stone That Wanted Things

The universe runs on a schedule, and the schedule is one hundred and twenty-nine thousand six hundred years long.

Each cycle splits into twelve epochs. In the first, heaven congeals. In the second, earth settles out of it. In the third, living things arrive, blinking, and are immediately disappointing. Everything after that is decline, and at the end the whole apparatus collapses back into grey soup and starts over.

The bookkeeping is not mine. I want that understood. A scholar named Shao Yong worked it out in the eleventh century with a brush and an enormous amount of free time, the storytellers stole it because it made a good opening, and I am stealing it from them. Anyone who wants the arithmetic audited should take it up with Shao.

What matters is that when this story begins, the world is a little past its middle and starting to slide.

The Stone

Of the four great continents, we want the eastern one. In its ocean there is an island, and on the island a mountain, and the mountain is called Flower-Fruit Mountain, because the people who name mountains are not always trying very hard.

At the summit there is a stone.

It is thirty-six feet five inches tall, which is the number of degrees in a heavenly circuit. Twenty-four feet around, which is the number of solar terms in a year. It has nine apertures and eight holes, for the nine palaces and the eight trigrams. Nothing grows on it. It has been sitting there since the world was split open, drinking sunlight and moonlight and the general essence of things, and every living creature on that mountain has agreed, without discussion, to ignore it.

One day it hatched.

What came out was a stone egg, and what came out of the egg, after the wind got at it, was a monkey. Complete. Four limbs, two eyes, a full set of opinions. It learned to crawl in an afternoon. By evening it had walked to the edge of the summit and bowed to the four quarters, north south east west, the way a courtier bows, though nobody had ever shown it a courtier.

Two beams of golden light went out of its eyes and reached the Dipper Palace.

In the Dipper Palace the Jade Emperor was attending to something else. He dispatched two officers to the eastern gate to look. They looked. They came back and reported a monkey.

Creatures below are congealed from the essence of heaven and earth, said the Jade Emperor. There is nothing surprising in that.

And the court moved on to the next item on the agenda.

The monkey went down the mountain, drank from a stream and ate some fruit, and the golden light went out of his eyes and never came back.

The Waterfall

He fell in with the other monkeys, which was easy, because he was a monkey. They ate. They screamed at birds. They bathed in a mountain stream in the hot part of the afternoon, and one of them, floating on his back, said the thing that starts every disaster in this book:

Where does the water come from?

They followed it up. A waterfall came off a cliff like a hanging curtain, loud enough that they had to shout. Somebody proposed a dare. Whoever could go in through the water and come out again unhurt would be made king.

Three times nobody moved.

The stone monkey said I'll go, and went, because he did not know yet that this was the sort of thing that gets a person made responsible for others.

Behind the water there was no water. There was a bridge of iron plate, a chamber of stone benches and stone bowls, stone beds, stone pots, a stone stove with the soot of a fire nobody remembered lighting. And a tablet, standing in the middle, cut with ten characters:

He went back out through the falls, squatted on a rock, wrung out his tail, and told them.

They went in. They fought over the beds. They fought over the bowls. They dragged the pots around until the pots were somewhere else, which was the entire objective. Within an hour the stone monkey had been thoroughly and comprehensively forgotten, in a cave that only he had been willing to enter.

He let it run a while. Then he sat down on the largest stone bench and said, loudly:

A person without trust — I do not know what can be done with him.

He had been alive for less time than it takes a man to learn a trade, and he was quoting Confucius. Where he got it, the text does not say. The monkeys stopped fighting, which suggests he delivered it well.

They bowed. They made him king. He took the throne, considered his title, and announced that he would be known as the Handsome Monkey King.

Nobody had suggested the adjective.

Three Hundred Years

He was good at it. That should be said. He organized them, he named the older ones his ministers, he set the young ones to gathering, and he let them wrestle in the afternoons. No wolf came up the mountain, no eagle took a child. Nothing at all happened to them for three hundred years, and in the entire history of the world that is close to the best review a government has ever received.

Then, at a banquet, in the middle of a drinking song, the Handsome Monkey King put down his cup and cried.

The music stopped, in that ragged way music stops. His ministers crowded around and asked what was the matter. He was king of a blessed land, they said. He answered anybody who was rude to him with a stick. He had every fruit on the mountain and nobody above him at all.

I'm afraid, he said.

Of what.

Not now. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. Later. We're not on the register of Heaven. We're not on the register of Earth. But we're on the third one. King Yama keeps a book, and my name is in it, and one day a man in a black cap will come up that path and read it out, and the mountain will still be here and the fruit will still be here and I will not.

That is what he said. Whether that is what frightened him, I would not like to guess, and neither would the man who wrote this down.

An old ape at the back of the hall, one of the long-armed kind, clapped his hands.

Three sorts of beings are not in the book, he said. Buddhas. Immortals. Sages. They live inside old mountains and ancient caves. Find one and you learn what they know, and then you last as long as heaven lasts.

The Monkey King asked where.

Beyond the boundary of the world, said the old ape, which is the sort of directions you get.

He left in the morning. He left the way people leave when they are running from a thought: fast, and cheerful, and with an announcement.

Nine Years

This is the part everybody skips.

He built a raft out of dead pine and pushed off with a bamboo pole, and the wind was kind to him, and it carried him across the ocean to the southern continent, which is where humans live. And then he spent nine years there.

Nine years.

He mugged people on the road for their trousers. He put on a robe he had stolen from a man in a rice paddy and walked into a market town and learned to bow, and to say sir, and to walk on two legs for long enough that people took him for a very ugly monk. He was, by his own arrangement, a horror. Children ran. Dogs would not stop.

And in every town he found the oldest person in it and asked whether they had ever heard of a man who did not die.

Nobody had.

He built another raft. He crossed a second ocean. That one was less kind. He came ashore on the western continent, walked inland, and heard somebody singing in the trees.

The Monkey King came through the brush at a sprint and fell down in front of a woodcutter and called him an immortal.

The woodcutter nearly took his own foot off with the axe.

I've had rice gruel twice this week, he said, when he had recovered. What kind of immortal is that?

You were singing an immortal's song.

I was given it by a neighbour, up the hill. He said it would settle me when things were bad. The woodcutter shrugged. Things are bad.

Then go and live with him.

My father is dead. The woodcutter picked his axe back up. My mother is old and there's nobody else. I feed her, and I plant the vegetables, and when she goes I'll bury her, and that's the shape of it. I can't go up the hill.

The Monkey King looked at him for a while.

He had come out of a rock. He had never in his life met a creature with a claim on him that he had not invented himself, and he could not make the sentence mean anything. He turned it over the way you turn over a stone tool from a culture that left no writing.

Then he asked for directions, because that was the only part he understood.

Seven Miles

Seven miles south, said the woodcutter. The Mountain of the Spirit Terrace and the Square Inch. Look for the Cave of the Slanting Moon and Three Stars.

A slanting stroke. Three dots.

Write them down and you have written 心.

The Monkey King walked seven miles.

The cave door was jade, and shut. He climbed a pine and ate pine nuts and threw the shells, because he had been travelling for nine years and no longer had opinions about dignity. When the door opened it was a boy, hair in two loops, and the boy was annoyed.

My master was lecturing, the boy said. He stopped and said there's someone outside come to study the Way. Go and let him in. Is that you?

The Monkey King, who had told nobody, said that it was.

Inside there were thirty steps of jasper and a raised platform, and on the platform, cross-legged, sat Subhuti, and around him sat thirty disciples with their heads down. The Monkey King hit the ground and knocked his forehead on it a number of times he later claimed was uncountable.

Where are you from?

He told him. The ocean, the second ocean, the nine years.

Nine years to come here. Subhuti let that sit. What is your surname?

Now. The word for surname, spoken, sounds exactly like the word for temper.

I haven't got one, said the Monkey King, delighted to have an answer ready. If a man insults me I'm not offended. If he hits me I'm not angry. I just apologise. I've got no temper at all, my whole life.

Not that, said Subhuti. Your family. Your father and mother.

Haven't got those either.

Then you grew on a tree.

A stone, said the Monkey King, and for once he did not embellish. On a mountain. It cracked.

Subhuti came down off the platform and walked around him once, slowly, the way a man walks around a horse he is thinking of not buying.

Then we take it from what you are, he said. You look like a macaque. Húsūn. Take the character, cut off the animal radical, and what's left is Sūn. A child. A grandson. It will do for a surname.

The Monkey King heard grandson and did not object, which tells you how much he wanted this.

Twelve characters run through my lineage, said Subhuti. You are the tenth generation. Your character is Wù. Awakened. And after it —

He chose it without any ceremony at all, the way a man names a dog he intends to keep.

Kōng. Empty.

Sun Wukong, said Sun Wukong.

He said it to himself perhaps twenty times on the walk to the sleeping quarters, trying it in different mouths. Awakened to Emptiness. The disciples watched him do it and one of them laughed.

Nobody told him what it meant. He did not ask.

He had been alive three hundred and some years, and it was the first thing anyone had ever given him.