Three Taps on the Head

For six or seven years Sun Wukong swept the floor.

Also he carried water, weeded the garden, tended the fire, trimmed the lamps, and shut the gate at night. Nobody taught him anything. He did not complain, which was not like him, and he did not leave, which was not like him either, and after a while the other disciples stopped noticing him the way you stop noticing a broom.

Then one morning Subhuti took the high seat and spoke about the Way, and everyone sat very still, and Wukong got up at the back and started dancing.

Not politely. He capered. He pinched himself. He pulled at his ears and scratched his cheek and hopped from one foot to the other, grinning like a lunatic.

You, said Subhuti, not raising his voice. Why are you leaping about instead of listening.

I was listening, said Wukong. That's why I'm leaping.

The hall waited for him to be thrown out.

How long have you been here?

I don't know, said Wukong. There was a peach tree behind the mountain. I've eaten it bare seven times.

Then seven years. Subhuti looked at him for a moment. What is it you want to learn?

Whatever you've got. If there's a bit of the Way in it, I'll take it.

The Four Doors

There are three hundred and sixty side-schools, said Subhuti, and all of them lead somewhere. Shall I teach you the door of Method? Divination. The Book of Changes. Summoning immortals, casting for fortune, avoiding calamity by knowing where it will fall.

Would I live forever?

No.

Then I won't learn it.

There was a noise from the disciples like a room full of people deciding not to breathe.

The door of Schools, then. Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist. The reading of scriptures, the burning of incense, the interrogation of the sages.

Would I live forever?

It is like putting a pillar in a wall to hold the house up. One day someone knocks the wall down and finds the pillar rotted through.

Then I won't learn it.

The door of Stillness. Fasting, abstention, sitting until your legs forget they are legs. The nine changes and the golden fluid.

Would I live forever?

It is like a clay idol left out in the rain.

Then I won't learn it.

The door of Action. Subhuti's voice had gone very level. Gathering the yin, seizing the fortress, drawing back the bow, rubbing the navel, brewing autumn stone from a woman's milk.

Would I —

It is like scooping the moon out of a pond.

Then I won't learn that either.

Subhuti came down off the platform. He took the ruler he used for keeping order and hit Wukong on the head with it three times. Then he put his hands behind his back, walked to the inner door, went through it, and shut it in the face of the entire school.

The disciples turned on Wukong at once. You wretch, you insolent — they said, and more, and worse, and Wukong took all of it with an expression of purest delight and did not say one word in his own defence.

He had been hit three times. Hands folded behind the back. The inner door, closed.

At the third watch he went round to the back.

The Secret

Subhuti was lying on his side facing the wall, asleep, or doing an impression of it.

Wukong knelt by the bed and waited. After some time the old man rolled over.

You, he said. How did you get in.

Master, you told me yesterday. In front of everybody. Nobody heard you but me.

Subhuti sat up. He looked, in the lamplight, older than he had looked on the platform, and pleased in a way he had no intention of explaining.

You're a decent monkey, he said. Shut the door.

What he taught him that night the text sets down as verse, which is the storyteller's way of saying he is not going to tell you.

Wukong learned it in the time it takes to boil rice. He went back to the front hall before dawn and swept the floor.

Three years passed. He swept the floor.

The Three Calamities

Then one day Subhuti called him aside and asked how he was getting on, and Wukong said he was getting on beautifully, he felt very light, and Subhuti said good, and there is one thing left to discuss, and it is the thing that kills people like you.

Five hundred years from now, he said, Heaven will send a thunderbolt. Not a storm. A specific one, with your name on it. You must dodge it or you are ash.

Wukong stopped smiling.

Five hundred years after that, a fire. Not an ordinary fire. It begins under your ribs, in the place you keep the thing I taught you, and it burns outward, and there is no water anywhere that touches it.

And after that?

A wind. It does not blow on you. It goes in through the crown of your head, passes down through the body, and leaves by the soles of the feet, and it takes everything on the way. What's left standing looks exactly like you.

Master, said Wukong, in a tone he had never used before and would use again only twice in his life, you had better teach me how to hide.

There are two ways to hide. Thirty-six transformations, called the Heavenly Star count. Or seventy-two, called the Earthly Fiend count.

Wukong worked it out.

Seventy-two is more.

That is one way of choosing, said Subhuti, and taught him the seventy-two.

He picked them up like a boy picking up swearing. Within a month he could be a crane, a carp, a stone lantern, a girl selling melons, a fly on the rim of a cup.

He also learned to travel by cloud, or thought he had. Subhuti watched him do it once, from the courtyard, and made a face.

What is that.

That's cloud-soaring.

That is cloud-crawling. An immortal has breakfast in the Northern Sea and by evening he has been to Cangwu and back. You just went about three miles and looked pleased with yourself.

So he taught him the somersault cloud. You clench the fists, you say the words, you leap, and you land one hundred and eight thousand li away.

One hundred and eight thousand li. Which is, as it happens, the exact distance from Chang'an to the Western Paradise.

Remember that. He didn't.

The Pine Tree

It was an autumn evening. The disciples were sitting out under the pines and somebody said, Wukong, in what life did you earn this?

And somebody else said, Go on. Show us one.

And Wukong — who had waited seven years for a man to look at him and see anything but a broom, and who had by now been in that cave for close to twenty and could not have told you the year — Wukong laughed and said all right, name one.

A pine tree.

He shook himself. He said the word. He was a pine tree: crown, bark, the little dry cones, the resin smell, the whole thing.

The courtyard roared. They clapped. They shouted his name. They shouted it loudly, and they shouted it more than once.

The door of the inner hall banged open and Subhuti came out with his staff.

What is this noise.

Everyone knelt. Wukong turned back into himself and knelt too, on the pine needles, still delighted, still not understanding anything.

We were only playing.

Playing. Subhuti sent the others away and stood over him. Come here. You have something. Suppose you meet a man who does not have it. He sees what you can do. He asks you for it. Do you refuse him?

I —

If you refuse him he will hurt you to get it. And to keep from being hurt, you will teach him. And then you will have made a killer, and given him the tools. He tapped the staff on the ground once. Go.

Go where?

Where you came from.

Wukong wept. He said he had nowhere. He said he had been here twenty years. He said, in a voice that was not much of a voice, that he had not meant anything by it.

I don't care what you meant. You will get into trouble out there — I am not asking, I am telling you, you will get into enormous trouble, and it will be entirely of your own making. When you do, you will not mention my name.

I won't.

Say one word of where you learned it and I will know. I will flay the skin off you and grind your bones to powder and put your soul in the Ninth Darkness for ten thousand kalpas.

I'll say I taught myself, said Wukong.

He stood at the gate a moment before he left. The mountain was called the Spirit Terrace and the Square Inch, and the cave was the Slanting Moon and Three Stars, and he had never once asked why.

Master, he said. How long was I here?

Subhuti had already shut the door.

He kept the promise. Over the next ninety-eight chapters Sun Wukong tells everyone who will hold still exactly who he is: stone-born, king of Flower-Fruit Mountain, terror of the eastern ocean, Great Sage Equal to Heaven. He never names his teacher. Not once, to anybody, under any circumstance.

It is the only promise in the book he never breaks.