They tied him to the Demon-Subduing Pillar and set about executing him.
Sabres went blunt on his neck. Axes rebounded. They chopped and stabbed and burned him, and the Star Lord of Fire cooked him for an afternoon, and the Ministry of Thunder had a go with the bolts, and at the end of it was standing at the pillar with his hair singed, in a foul mood, entirely intact.
The peaches, said the clerks. The wine. The pills. He is not a body any more. He is not made of the kind of thing you can cut.
came forward and said that in that case he would take him.
Forty-Nine Days
The Eight Trigrams Brazier stands in the Tushita Palace and it has eight positions around the fire, one for each trigram, and it had been alight for a very long time. They put him in and shut the lid and Laozi went away to lecture.
Inside, Wukong found the fire.
He also found, by walking round the wall, that in the Xun position — the trigram of wind — there was no flame at all. Where there is wind there is smoke, and where there is smoke there is no fire.
So he sat down in the wind position.
He sat there for forty-nine days.
The smoke went into his eyes. That was the only part of it that reached him. Day after day, in the dark, at the bottom of the furnace of the ages, the smoke worked at his eyes until the whites of them turned red and the pupils turned gold, and he came out of it with eyes that could see through any disguise in the universe, forever.
He never asked for that. Nobody gave it to him. He got it by hiding.
He came out weeping smoke, and could see everything.
This is the only gift in the book
that nobody had to hand him.
On the fiftieth day Laozi came to open the lid and check the ashes, and a hand came out.
He kicked the brazier across the palace. He picked the cudgel out of his ear and went through the Tushita Palace and out into Heaven, and there was nothing anywhere in the sky that could stand in front of him. He beat the guard at the Hall of Divine Mists. He beat the thunder gods. He was thirty feet from the throne, and the Jade Emperor, who had never in his existence had to do this, sent a message west.
The Bet
arrived from Vulture Peak, walked through the fighting without hurrying, and asked everybody to stop, and everybody stopped.
You, he said. Monkey. What is your grievance.
Wukong told him. He told him about the stone and the ocean and the horses. He came, at last, to his point, and he made it clearly, and it is the best speech he ever gives:
He has held that seat for a very long time. There is a saying: the Emperor takes turns, and next year it is my house. Tell him to move out and give it to me. If he won't, I'll keep on making trouble, and there won't be a day's peace up here.
You are a monkey who found a way to live a long time, said the Buddha, not unkindly. He has been in that seat for one thousand seven hundred and fifty kalpas. Each kalpa is a hundred and twenty-nine thousand six hundred years. Work out how much cultivating that is, and tell me what qualifies you.
He's had a long run. That's an argument for moving.
The Buddha looked at him for a while and then put out his right hand, palm up.
Then let us make a wager, he said. If you can somersault out of my palm, I will ask him to move west and the throne is yours, and there will be no fighting. If you cannot get out, you will go down and be an immortal on the earth for a few more turns, and we will say no more about it.
Wukong looked at the hand. It was the size of a lotus leaf.
He was already laughing.
He was, remember, extremely fast. He could go a hundred and eight thousand li in one leap. He stepped into the palm, said watch this, clenched his fists, and jumped.
Five Pillars
He went a very long way.
He came down at last in a place where the world ended: five flesh-coloured pillars going up into a green mist, the edge of everything, nothing beyond.
Right, he said. That's the boundary. Now — evidence.
He pulled a hair, blew on it, made a brush, and wrote up the middle pillar in large characters:
THE GREAT SAGE EQUAL TO HEAVEN WAS HERE.
Then, on the consideration that he was alone at the edge of the universe and nobody would ever know, he took a piss at the foot of the first pillar.
He somersaulted back, landed in the Buddha's palm, and said, Right. I've been. Go and tell him to clear out.
You stinking ape, said the Buddha. You never left the palm of my hand.
I did. I went to the end of the world. There are five pillars there. I wrote my name on the middle one. Come with me and I'll show you.
No need, said the Buddha. Look down.
On the base of the Buddha's middle finger, in Wukong's own hand, in large characters: THE GREAT SAGE EQUAL TO HEAVEN WAS HERE.
And between the thumb and the first finger, faintly, the smell of monkey urine.
He stared at it.
Then he said the only sensible thing available, which was I don't believe it, and turned to jump again.
The Mountain
The Buddha turned his hand over.
He pushed him out through the western gate of Heaven, and as he fell the five fingers became metal, wood, water, fire, earth, and settled into a mountain range on top of him, and the mountain was called the Mountain of Five Phases, and Wukong was under it with his head and his hands and the very top of his shoulders out in the air, and everything else was rock.
He could not move. He could still shout, and he did.
The Buddha, going back west, paused and gave two instructions. A paper seal was to be fixed to the summit, six gold characters on it, om mani padme hum, and while it was there nothing could lift the mountain. And the local spirit of the place was to see that he was fed.
When he is hungry, said the Buddha, give him iron pellets. When he is thirsty, give him molten copper.
Not as cruelty. He does not sound angry anywhere in this passage. He sounds like an administrator solving the storage problem of an object that cannot be destroyed. The pellets and the copper are not a punishment. They are food. They will keep the prisoner alive, and the prisoner cannot die anyway, and the mountain must not be moved.
In time, he added, his sins will exhaust themselves and somebody will come and get him out.
He did not say who. He did not say when.
The Party
Then the gods of Heaven, delivered, threw a banquet.
The Jade Emperor named it the Great Festival for the Pacification of Heaven. The Buddha came. The Bodhisattvas came, the Immortals of the Five Poles came, the Star Lords and the Constellations and the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas, the Ten Kings of the Dead. Laozi came down from the Tushita Palace. The Queen Mother sent peaches, a great many of them, from the back twelve hundred trees, which had had four hundred years to recover and had recovered.
The Gold Star of Venus was there. He drank a little and did not say much.
It went on for some days. The tables were laid at the Jade Pool, in the same hall, and everything was very fine, and nobody who was there had any reason to think about anything else, and nobody did.
Five hundred years later a monk came along the road.
Iron for hunger. Copper for thirst.
Above, on the summit, a strip of paper
that a wind could have taken, and did not.