The two Sun Wukongs came before the at Vulture Peak, still fighting, still shouting the same words in the same voice, and the whole assembly of the Western Heaven looked at them and could not choose, and the Buddha smiled, because the Buddha could.
He let them make their cases — both monkeys pleading in one voice to be known as the true one, each certain, each identical — and then he explained, to the assembly, what the second monkey was. A Six-Eared Macaque, he said. One of the four spirits the ordinary order of creation does not contain, a listener so complete it can hear the future and know the past and become another being so perfectly that no mirror, no register, no bodhisattva can find the seam. That is why nothing in Heaven or the underworld could tell them apart, he said. There was no seam to find.
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