Five hundred years went by. They do not get a chapter. Heaven held its banquets, the seasons of the lower world turned over like pages, and under a mountain in the borderlands a head stuck out of the rock and watched the road.
Then the , at Vulture Peak, finished a lecture and made an announcement.
I have three baskets of scriptures, he said. One speaks of Heaven. One speaks of the Earth. One redeems the dead. The lands of the East are greedy and murderous and deaf, and these books would cure them. But I will not send them.
Somebody asked why not.
A thing delivered free is a thing despised, said the Buddha. Someone must come from the East and fetch them. On foot. All the way. Who will go and find me a pilgrim?
stood up before he had finished the sentence.
The Buddha looked pleased, in the way of a man whose meeting has gone exactly as planned, and gave her five treasures to take: a brocade cassock, a nine-ringed staff, and three golden bands.
The cassock and the staff are for the pilgrim, he said. The bands are different. If you meet a monster on the way with real ability and a bad attitude, get one onto its head. There is a spell that goes with each. You will find that attitudes improve.
He said it exactly that blandly. Keep the bands in mind. Everyone else in this story will forget about them at the worst possible moment.
The River
She went east along the ground, not the sky, because a scout who flies over the route has not scouted it. At a river eight hundred li wide, where goose feathers sink, something came out of the water and tried to eat her.
Her disciple beat it back into the shallows, and it took one look at who was standing on the bank and dropped its staff and knelt in the mud.
I know you, it said. I'm not a monster. I had a position.
He had been the Curtain-Raising Marshal, personal attendant at the Jade Emperor's throne. At a Peach Banquet he had dropped a crystal cup. That was the whole crime. It broke, and he was given eight hundred lashes and thrown down to this river, and every seven days a flying sword comes and runs him through the chest a hundred times and more, on a schedule, and then leaves until the next appointment.
So I eat travellers, he finished, in the tone of a man rounding out a CV. There's nothing else here.
Around his neck hung nine skulls. He had eaten many pilgrims, he explained, and the skulls all sank in this river where even feathers sink. Only these nine had refused to go down. They floated. So he had strung them, because a thing that will not sink is either an omen or a decoration, and he was lonely enough to want both.
said Guanyin.
She gave him a religious name, Sha Wujing, Sand Awakened-to-Purity, and moved on. He stood in the shallows and watched her go. Then he sat down at the edge of the river that was the whole of his world, with his nine floating omens, to wait for a stranger. He waited several years. The text does not dwell on it and neither will we.
The Pig
At a high mountain further east, something else attacked her, and this one had a nine-toothed rake and the face of a pig.
He had been the Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds, admiral of the Milky Way, eighty thousand sailors under him. At a banquet — a different banquet; count how many of this book's catastrophes begin at parties — he had got drunk and laid hands on the Moon Lady. For that: two thousand blows of the mallet, and exile into a mortal womb. He took a wrong turn on the way down and came out of a sow.
Look at me, he said, and it was not a request for sympathy so much as an item of evidence. I bit my own litter to death and ate the sow, and I took this mountain, and I eat men because grass doesn't fill me. And now I suppose you'll tell me that's wrong.
said Guanyin.
The West! He spat. Feed a man on wind, is it. I've got a lay of the land here, a widow's farm, prospects. Why would I trade prospects for a walk?
She talked to him for a while. Nobody knows what she said; the text keeps it off the page. At the end of it he knelt and took the vows and a name, Zhu Wuneng, Pig Awakened-to-Ability, and swore off the five pungent foods and the three forbidden meats, and stood there on his mountain, an admiral in a pig's body, on a diet, waiting for a stranger.
One broke a cup. One broke a rule.
The sentences did not distinguish.
Heaven files both under broken.
The Dragon and the Rock
Further on, a young dragon hung in the sky on a hook of cloud, waiting to be executed. Third son of a Dragon King; he had let the palace catch fire and burn the pearl of his father's own hall, and his father had reported him. His own father had reported him. Heaven ran the paperwork and scheduled the death.
Guanyin went up to the throne and asked for him, the way you ask for a thing you know you will be given, and got him.
she told the dragon.
His what?
The dragon opened his mouth and then, being young but not stupid, closed it, and went to live in a ravine and wait.
And at last she came to the Mountain of Five Phases, where a golden light stood over the summit, and under the light, at the foot of the rock, a head.
There was moss on the face. Grass had seeded in the crevices by his hands and grown up and dried and reseeded, some number of times.
Is that who I think it is, said , or have I finally started making people up?
She came and stood where he could see her without straining. He asked what year it was. She told him.
He was quiet for a moment, working the number, and you could watch him decide not to have a reaction to it.
I've had time, he said. Whatever the correct amount of repenting is, assume it's done, and get me out.
I'll take it, he said, instantly, without asking a single question about the pilgrim, the route, the duration, or the terms, which tells you everything about the previous five hundred years.
She gave him his instructions and turned to go, and he called after her, and what he called was not thank you and not hurry.
You'll tell him where I am? He won't miss the mountain?
She went on to Chang'an with her disciple, and the two of them turned into a pair of scabby travelling monks, and disappeared into the city, and waited. The city did not notice two more poor monks. Cities never do.