From protean ape to handsome saint: the Monkey King

·期刊原文

From protean ape to handsome saint: the Monkey King

(Chinese folkloric character)

Whalen Lai

Asian Folklore Studies

Vol.53 No.1 (April 1994) pp.29-65

COPYRIGHT Asian Folklore Studies (Japan) 1994 Abstract

The novel Monkey or Journey to the West tells of a simian's revolt
against Heaven, of its defeat by the Buddha, and of its later being
recruited as a pilgrim to protect the monk Tripitaka on his quest
for scriptures in India. This essay traces Monkey's background to a)
a mythic battle between a land deity and a water deity; b) a myth
about an aboriginal in a medieval forest who is converted by
Buddhist missionaries and becomes a saint who protects his new
faith, just as St. Christopher, originally a subhuman Dog-man in the
forest, became the patron saint of travelers; c) a folk Zen parody
of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng (who was called a "southern barbarian
monkey"); d) an ancient tradition about the Chinese Titans - the
demigods of Xia - striking back at the Zhou god of Heaven that
displaced them. The appendix goes into the folklore of the Frog, a
chthonic deity kept alive among southern non-Chinese aboriginals.
Key words: Monkey - water deity - missiology - Zen - Titan
As Christianity spread west, into the wilds of the European
continent, the desert wilderness came to be replaced by the forest
primeval.... In this new context, the location of a sacred utopia,
the place where one prepares for the end of time, became the edge of
the forest.... Opposed to the world, to inhabited areas where human
culture and society thrived, was the vast uninhabited fastness of
the forest. This polarity replaced the ancient urbs/rus
(city/country) opposition in the European Middle Ages. In this
context, savagery (Latin silvatica from silva, forest) was not
wholly inhuman, but was located at the absolute limit of human
activity. Nevertheless, many crossed this fundamental boundary in
the Middle Ages. Besides the monastic hermit, there were kings for
whom the forest was a hunting reserve, errant forest-dwellers who
eked out a foraging existence, social marginals, the criminals, and
the insane. In courtly literature, the forest became a place of
adventure, where heroes encountered wild men and savage beasts - and
where the distinction between the two was quite blurred. The
uninhabited forest, the medieval wilderness, is at once a place of
exile, evangelistic mission, adventure, penance, and asylum; a place
of terrible fascination to all those who lived hemmed in by its dark
presence. It was here, moreover, that most mythic accounts of
monstrous persons or races were set....
Every Chinese knows the Xiyouji the story of the Monkey
King. It has been recited, staged, illustrated for magazines, and
animated for movies and television. It has been honored with two
English translations, an abbreviated one by Arthur Waley (1943) and
a complete, annotated one by Anthony C. Yu (1977). The latter is by
far the better of the two; even its title - The Journey to the West
- is a more fitting rendition of the original Chinese than is
Waley's Monkey.[1]
The story of the Monkey King is made up of two originally
independent parts. The first tells of the Monkey King creating havoc
in Heaven. This part ends with the Buddha trapping Monkey under the
Buddha's cosmic palm. The second half has Monkey, many years later,
released from captivity so that he might serve the monk Xuan-zang
(Tripitaka) on the latter's journey to the West (i.e., India) in a
quest for Buddhist scriptures. The full story as we now have it
clearly evolved
over time. Wu Cheng'en is generally regarded as the final author
and compiler. The finished work is counted as one of China's four
major novels.
Although the two parts of Monkey's career are now presented as one,
we can still enjoy part one without going on to part two. The story
of the exploits of the simian trickster defying Heaven can well
stand on its own. Here is Monkey upsetting the cosmic order (dike to
the Greeks) and, for that act of hubris, suffering a fall. Albert
Camus might have preferred the story of this simian Sisyphus to end
here: better to have this Chinese Prometheus chained under a rocky
mountain than to have him turned into a pious pilgrim to serve a new
master. But the tale of the Monkey King as we have it now precludes
this type of selective reading a la Camus. It is the destiny of
Monkey, Sun Wukong
(Monkey Awakened to Emptiness), to change from rebel to pilgrim. The
taming of this shrewd ape by the Buddha at the end of the first part
leads naturally to his joining the other four pilgrims - Tripitaka,
Pigsy, Sandy, and the White Horse - to find Buddhahood in the West.
Space precludes an analysis of this "Journey to the West" in the
present study, which will only examine Monkey's career up to his
capture by the Buddha.
Much scholarship, especially in Chinese, has been devoted to the
study of this novel, and we cannot hope to survey all of it here.
Instead, I would like to focus on a particular area where more work
needs to be done. As Anthony Yu noted in the introduction to his
translation:
The question why "a popular religious folk hero should acquire
bizarre animal attendants" and why a monkey figure should enjoy such
preeminence cannot be settled until further knowledge in Chinese
folklore is gained. (1977, 3)
I will attempt to clarify this question by examining how this
Ape-Man and enemy of civilized order came in the end to be the St.
Christopher of the Buddhist mission in medieval China.
Part 1: When Gods Have Two Faces
The story of Monkey (our shorthand for the first part of the novel;
Journey will henceforth denote the second part) may be grouped under
four themes: Monkey's birth, his awakening, his outrages, and his
defeat. These four topics, identifiable with chapters in the book,
may be aligned with the mythic motifs that inspire them as follows:
Scholarly attention has focused to date on the first and the last
connections, i.e., on prefigurations of the Monkey King and on his
final defeat at the hand of a protagonist. I will review and amend
that scholarship in parts 1 and 2 of this paper, and will
investigate the other two, less studied, topics in parts 3 and 4.
In English, the groundwork on Monkey's origin and end was done by
Dudbridge (1970), who lists three major antecedents to Monkey: 1)
the White Ape as a seducer of women; 2) the monkey subdued
by the god Erlang; and 3) the water monster Wuzhiqi subdued by
Sage-King Yu. His findings and views can be summarized as follows.
1) The White Ape is a Monkey King known for his abduction of women.
According to a variant of this tale in Eberhard (1965), he kidnapped
a girl and kept her in his treasure cove. The girl's mother found
her way to his distant kingdom, where she managed to fool the small
monkeys that kept guard and free her daughter. Mother and child
escaped with additional loot from the Monkey King's treasure
cove.[2]
2) Erlang is a river god known for battling river dragons and other
monsters. He once shackled the Monkey King, who claimed to be the
Sage Equal to Heaven. Their battle is now preserved in Monkey.
3) Wuzhiqi is a water monkey who was subdued by the sage-king
Yu , the hero of the Flood in ancient China. He imprisoned the
water monster under a mountain. Wuzhiqi is a "spineless" Hydra;
Monkey shared his fate in being similarly entrapped under a
mountain.
Dudbridge's findings are enlightening, but fail to deal with the
apparent inconsistencies: Monkey never seduced or kidnapped women as
the White Ape did, and was more imp than monster.
Tripitaka's disciple (Monkey) commits crimes which are mischievous
and irreverent, but the white ape is from first to last a monstrous
creature which has to be eliminated. The two acquire superficial
points of similarity when popular treatment of the respective
traditions, in each case of Ming date, coincides in certain details
of nomenclature. (Dudbridge 1970, 128)[3]
For a precursor to this disciple of Tripitaka, Dudbridge looked to
stories about pious monkeys who listen to sutras and to the animal
apostles of Mulian in the drama of Mulian's attempt to save his
mother from the Buddhist hell.[4]
Finally, unlike Wuzhiqi, Monkey is not known to have been a water
spirit. In fact, there are times in the novel when Monkey is said to
be impotent in water. There is also a separate Water Monkey, a
monster who appears later in Journey, that seeks to harm the
pilgrims.[5] Logic would therefore suggest that the connection
between Monkey, the White Ape, and Wuzhiqi is tenuous.
But logic seldom has the last word in myths. In myths, opposites may
meet in classic coincidentia oppositorum, and as a part of medieval
drama sinners might turn into saints and monsters end up as converts
and defenders of the faith. In other words, the very inconsistencies
may well provide clues for penetrating the ancient myths and their
evolution.[6] And as long as we are dealing in lunar and aquatic
myths, we should be prepared for the lunacy of moons and the
slipperiness[7] of water.[8]
When Good and Evil Were One
When Arthur Waley translated the Daodejing , he chose to render
the title The Way and Its Power (1934) instead of The Way and Its
Virtue, justifying this by noting that de connotes mana, and that
like mana it was once a premoral concept.[9] In the premoral stage
of man's religious development, power encompasses both good and
evil. Nietzsche, in his "genealogy of morals," comes to much the
same conclusion. That ambivalence may help us appreciate the two
faces of certain ancient gods that lurk behind the story of Monkey
and Erlang.
Erlang is, as we have noted, a Chinese god of the waters. His cult
rose and flourished in Xichuan. As Li Erlang , his cult merged with
that of Li Bing , a historical figure from the Warring States period.
A governor of Chengtu , Li Bing was known for his waterworks; he
created a canal system that is still in use today. By controlling
the Yangtze's flow, Li tamed the river and benefited the people. He
was the counterpart of the Sage Yu, who stemmed the Great Flood. The
only difference is that Yu stopped the flooding of the Yellow River
downstream while Li Bing diverted the waters of the Yangtze
upstream. Both were lionized by the people, and their lives are
shrouded in legend.[10]
The myth of Li's feat tells us this: When Li entered the water to
tame the river, people reportedly saw, from a distance, a fierce
battle between two bulls or rhinoceroses on the bank. One eventually
subdued the other. When the myth is translated into more prosaic
discourse, it is saying that Li was one bull or rhino and the raging
river was the other. The bull or rhino that subdued the river was
the one who won the fight.
This story might sound odd at first, but it is a variant of a more
familiar tale: the myth of two dragons locked in mortal combat.
Throughout China's history, sightings of two combatting dragons
"outside the village" (i.e., beyond the limit of order), "at a
river," or "in the desert" (i.e., in chaos itself) are common. The
fight usually takes place "at night" and is almost always witnessed
"from a (safe) distance." No respectable travelogue about foreign
lands could do without such an episode.
Xuan-zang's historical Xiyouji reported one such elemental
battle he witnessed en route to India, said to have occurred in the
Gobi Desert outside China proper. It is a classic myth of chaos - or
of order (cosmos) battling chaos.
Regardless of whether chaos, or nature "at war with itself," is seen
as a pair of rhinos or as a pair of dragons, the point of the story
is the same: there are two sides or faces to nature. In the case of
a battle by a river (or on its banks), the story is pointing out
that the river can be both good and evil. When the water flows in an
orderly fashion, it is good; when the same water floods, it is evil.
When the two forces are pictured as draconic, we have a battle of
dragons. The auspicious river dragon is called long , while the malicious one is called
gao (corresponding to a kraken). Sometimes the two can be compounded
as one, in which case we have the classic gao-long, a dragon that
gao or "interlocks" with itself. That "mix" can be depicted as a
dragon and a kraken with tails interlocking, or else as simply one
dragon shown as a snake (dragon) biting its own tail. This image,
the symbol of the eternal return, is the image of Time swallowing
its own sons, i.e., old Kronos in Greek mythology. The same
interlocking design surfaces
in China's depiction of its primeval couple, Fuxi and Nugua ,
who, half-human and half-snake, served as the ancestors of man.
Their intertwining tails tell a tale later systematized into Chinese
metaphysics, which says that there was One Great Unity or Ultimate
before the division into male and female, yang and yin.
The story of Li Bing battling the river, rhino locking horns with
rhino, is a variant of the same cosmic drama. The river and its god
are one: the same river with two faces that can nurture as well as
kill. In the story the good side wins, but fundamentally good and
evil are not moral opposites: they could just as well be the river
in its two moods. In Japan, Shintoism knew this as the two sides of
the kami: a god can be gentle and good (nigitama) but can suddenly
become rough and destructive (aratama). This ambiguity attends a
number of Chinese flood
heroes: Gong-gong , the earliest; Gun , the father of Yu; Sage-King
Yu himself; Fuxi and Nugua, the divine couple; Yiyi , born
of an empty gourd; Ximen Bao , an official and water engineer at
Ye; Li Bing in Xichuan; and Erlang alias Yang Jian [Li Bing] in The
Investiture of the Gods. Some of these heroes double as villains.
Gong-gong, for example, was accused of causing a flood; Gun of
making it worse.
The choice of animals - a sea creature like the dragon or a land
animal like the bull - for representing these forces of nature is in
part due to the geographic locations involved. Here is a simple
table of the animals involved in three classical Chinese stories of
a conflict involving floods:
In the case of Li Bing, the battle was in the west and upland, so it
is depicted as rhino versus rhino (on land or on the bank). In the
case of Sage-king Yu it was in the east and downstream, so it is
depicted as dragon versus dragon. Yu as the dragon of order was
fighting the kraken of chaos. Since the east is the home of the
Green Dragon of the waters and the west is the home of the White
Tiger of the land - so goes the later Han schematic iconography - it
is only fitting that dragons should battle in the waters to the east
while rhinos (bulls, water buffaloes) should fight it out on the
banks in the west.
In between, we find the story of Ximen Bao, a mix of the two. We are
told that Bao was an official appointed to the ancient capital of
Ye.
Told of a yearly sacrifice of a young maiden to Ho Bo , the river god,
Bao threw the female shamans who headed the cult into the river
instead and thereby put an end to the nonsense. The name Ximen Bao
means, literally, "Leopard at the Western Portal." The human
official Bao is a personification of what, in a Western context,
would be the dog (guarding the gate) of Hades. A persona of the
White Tiger of the West (both "white" and "west" describe Death),
Bao was the land animal battling the river dragon that was Ho Bo.
This was a battle of land versus water and, by correlative
extension, of west and east, fall and spring, yin and yang, death
and life.
Understanding how the same god can have two faces and how it can do
battle against its own alter ego better enables us to understand how
Monkey and Erlang could well be friends as well as foes; or how
Monkey as a beast of the forest could also double as a water
monster.
Conflict between Protean Siblings
In the story of Ximen Bao, Bao the leopard defeated Ho Bo the river
dragon, representing a triumph of land over water. At first glance,
Erlang the river god outwitting the land animal Monkey appears to be
the reverse of this. The reversal would not be unexpected: in the
cycle of seasons, sometimes yang is on the ascent and sometimes yin
is; both the dragon of water and the tiger of land - each a
combination of yin and yang - have their day of victory, i.e., in
spring and in fall. But this is not the issue. The issue is that,
upon more careful examination, the line of demarcation between land
and water may not always be that clear. Monkey could just as well be
of the water, and Erlang could just as well be of the land.
To begin with, both Monkey and Erlang were protean. Proteus was a
minor Titan of the sea known for his ability to assume many forms.
That Erlang was protean is to be expected; he could effect multiple
transformations as a god of the river. But Monkey had that power
too: he had acquired the magical power of earthly transformation,
or, better, lunar metamorphosis. Water and moon are related - the
lunar pull on the tides is well known and is an accepted part of the
mythopoeic imagination. Unlike land, which is formed mass, water is
formless and fluid; unlike the sun, which is known for its
constancy, the moon is prized for its changes. It waxes and wanes.
When the poem Questions
to Heaven" in Songs of the South asks, "What virtue (de ) / Has
the moon / That as it waxes / It also wanes?" it only underscores
the irony that de, which nowadays is associated with constancy - we
say "constancy of virtue," for example - used to be associated with
inconstancy or potency. De was "power," as Waley has it, the potency
for endless change.
As Monkey was protean, he was aquatic. That is why Monkey had no
trouble diving into the waterfall next to his mountain cave so that
he could make his way to the palace of the Dragon King. This he was
able to do because in China, as in a number of cultures, all land
was thought to rest on water, so that any opening of water would
lead to the subterranean ocean and thereby to any other water
opening on land. The idea that Monkey could not swim is a legacy of
a purely chthonic reading of his past, and is perhaps based on the
Romayana (see note 8) or upon an attempt to set up a division of
labor among the three fighting attendants of Tripitaka in journey.
Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy were best able to fight in the air, on
land, and in the water (quicksand), respectively. Monkey, however,
had clear aquatic ties. It is as a water monster that he was
confined by the Buddha under land, i.e., under a cosmic mountain.
Such mountains have regularly been used to keep water ogres down -
Wuzhiqi, the Chinese Hydra, suffered that fate under Sage-King Yu.
In the story of Madame White Snake, the he-demon of the lake who
tried to drown the Golden Mountain was likewise finally pinned under
a pagoda (a Buddhakaya on an isle in the middle of the lake.
Just as Monkey was not simply a land dweller, Erlang who subdued him
was not purely a denizen of the water. Erlang also had both land and
water associations - in fact, the name Erlang, which is usually read
"Number Two Son," could well mean that there were originally "two"
of them. And there were two Erlangs: Li Erlang, who was the god of
the waters, and Yang Erlang, who was the god of the forest and the
hunt and who ran about with two white hounds. It seems that Li
Erlang was worshipped by fishermen and farmers, while Yang Erlang
was worshipped by hunters and berdsmen. The god Erlang that appears
in Monkey is a mix of the two. When Monkey exercises his protean
power, Erlang matches his transformations one by one. He thus fights
Monkey on land, in the air, and underwater. This is his Li Erlang
aspect. But Erlang's final capture of Monkey is in a game: Monkey is
lassoed by Erlang while cornered by two white hounds. Monkey is a
victim of the bunt. Here we have the aspect of Yang Erlang
surfacing.(11)
What all this says is that Erlang and Monkey were kindred spirits.
They were quarrelsome siblings. Both can represent land or water
such that their cosmic battle was as much a battle of land vs.
water, land vs. land, or water vs. water. There is no inconsistency
in Monkey's being both fearful of water and capable (of swimming) in
water.
This brings us to the other alleged inconsistency: the charge that
Monkey could not possibly be the White Ape because Monkey was not a
womanizer.
Beauty and the Beast
In the context of his eventual salvation in a religion (Buddhism)
that prizes asceticism, it is of course important that Monkey does
not seduce women. But to argue therefore that Monkey cannot possibly
have had a tie to White Ape the playboy is to forget another Janus
aspect of this demigod. Seduction is, after all, the flip side of
asceticism, with both pointing to the same age-old concern with
fertility.
Both river nymphs and forest satyrs were regarded as quite fertile.
What they did with their fertility - indulge it or deny it - was a
matter of choice. Ho Bo, the river god, indulged it by insisting on
his annual bride. Ximen Bao, we are told, denied him that perpetual
human sacrifice when he stopped the licentious cult by throwing the
ugly female shamans into the river and saving the pretty prospective
bride. But the idea that Bao was a St. Michael saving a "maiden in
distress" from a dirty old monster is a distortion of fact. The
female shamans were the happy brides of this Chinese Dracula. Bao
was just a disgruntled Mr. Killjoy who did not approve of the rowdy
goings-on in this fertility rite during the Chinese lunar version of
the "Merrie Month of May."(12)
Ximen Bao might have decided to starve the river god's sexual
appetite, but Li Bing, who battled the same evil river kraken,
apparently decided on a different ruse. It is said that Li Bing once
changed himself into two beautiful women (erliang[Character No
Conversion), in order to seduce and entrap the monster. This has led
some to think that the name Erlang (two males) derives from erliang
(thus, two females). The seduction in this case is a positive use of
sex to battle the demon. But whether it be positive or negative, the
theme is that of fertility, and the cult is that of a man-god
romance.
In fertility religions, such seduction was fair play in spring, when
nymphs by the river inlets and satyrs in the hillsides enticed men
and women into sex. In China, Archer Yi[Character No Conversion]
fooled around with one such river nymph - to the anger of Ho Bo, who
claimed to own all the nymphs. In Greece, the women of Athens ran
off merrily to the hills to greet the boyish Dionysos in the forest.
In India, gopis still court Krsna in his haunts. All of this was
considered harmless fun until Confucian morality, Christian
righteousness, and Buddhist asceticism decided that such erotic
license was evil. Thus in medieval piety the once innocent nymph
became a she-demon and the once worry-free satyr a devil. In Chinese
folklore these two classic figures were, respectively, Madame White
Snake who dined on young men and King White Ape who kidnapped young
girls. They became witch and warlock, with her paying the higher
price in the sexist rewrites: he was only enslaved, but she was
killed outright.(13)
Not all of the demigods of old ended up as demons in the new
religions. Some made good, like Erlang. Ximen Bao, who could well
have become the Dog of Hades, ended up as the witch hunt, while
Xiwangmu [Character No Conversion], his female counterpart who was
originally a maneating tigress, is now remembered as the generous
Queen Mother of the West and bestower of immortality.(14) Monkey and
the White Ape parted company at this point. Monkey could easily have
been a womanizer too-he is, after all, much sought after as a mate
by the female demons who prey on the pilgrims in journey. It is just
that whereas the gullible Pigsy is still driven by lust, the wiser
Monkey chooses to remain chaste. He thus does what Diana, goddess of
the hunt and lady of the forest, did in Greece. Diane bathing in her
pool was as naked and nubile as Venus rising fresh from the sea, but
she chose to be a manly huntress, an eternal virgin. Monkey too
chooses to remain a preadolescent imp and thereby avoids the
skirt-chasing career of the White Ape, Playboy of the West (i.e., of
the western hills).
The ascetic Siva and the erotic Siva are not viewed as separate -
there is only one Siva with two aspects.(15) So too, Monkey and the
White Ape appear to be opposite only if we dwell on their surface
differences. Satan was a seducer and a rebel angel, and for that he
came to a well-deserved end. Monkey was a rebel but not a seducer,
and for that he remained redeemable. To see how his puerile chastity
made him eligible to become a defender of the faith, it is not
enough to consider Jungian archetypes - we must examine the history
of religions.
Part 2: From Titan to Saint
In the succession of religions, there are only so many ways the old
gods can end up. They can fade away, in which case they are lost to
us for good; they can be held up to scorn as pagan demons who
persisted in their old, evil ways; or they can be recruited into the
new faith as its servants and defenders. Monkey followed the last
pattern. He was an old Titan, once chained and damned, who was
somehow freed and made to serve the Buddha and his messenger,
Tripitaka.
This pattern of subjugation and conversion had already occurred
during the rise of Buddhism in India with the Vedic gods and demons
(the deva and the asura). Indra, the storm god of the warriors,
became Sakra, who piously requested teachings from the Buddha.
Brahman, the creator god, turned into a defender of the Law. Lesser
deities too resurfaced in new roles. The nymph-like yaksi came to
decorate the gates of the stupas at Sanchi, and heavenly nymphs
became angelic musicians, scattering flowers in the air (they
remained scantily dressed, as fertility deities should). Satyr-like
yaksas ran errands for Yama, the old moon god who now supervised the
Buddhist hells, and so on. Their fate is not unlike that of the gods
of Old Europe. Those who did not fade away ended up either as
denizens of hell or as saints in the Christian calendar.
The same pattern is observable as Buddhism spread into China. Old
Chinese gods and demiurges were recruited into the burgeoning
Sinitic Mahayana pantheon, and in the process a form of hierarchy
among them emerged. We see one pecking order of these native gods in
Monkey, most clearly in the way Monkey is captured. Earlier, Erlang
would have single-handedly captured Monkey, much as Sage-king Yu did
his Hydra. In Monkey, however, Erlang takes his orders from the Jade
Emperor, who has headed the Taoist pantheon since the Sung. In the
process, Erlang, instead of lassoing Monkey himself, now defers to
Laozi, who does the actual lassoing.
Laozi, a hermit sage who moved outside the theocratic order, was not
an official subordinated to the Jade Emperor. If anything, he was a
Pure One, one of a trio that oversaw everything below the realm of
his Grotto Heaven. In the novel, he is a freelance "ghost-buster"
brought in especially for the occasion. Were this a purely Taoist
novel, that would have been the end of it: Laozi would have been
powerful enough to cook Monkey alive in his alchemic caldron, and
the Jade Emperor would have thanked the Old Boy for his effortless
effort. But this is now a Buddhist, not just a Taoist, tale. Thus
Monkey has to prove too powerful a demon for even Laozi, whose
Taoist exorcism falls (it also falls in the Buddhist rewrite of
Madame White Snake - the shedemon outwits a Taoist exorcist, proves
too powerful for a Buddhist monk, and is only subdued when Guanyin
[Character No Conversion], the Mahayana goddess of mercy, steps in).
Monkey not only escapes Laozi's caldron unscathed, he actually
becomes a better immortal for it. The mightier Buddha finally has to
step in to finish the job. This is how Monkey ends. In journey,
however, this was deemed incomplete: the Buddha with his cosmic
power had more Hinayinist wisdom than Mahayanist compassion. So in
the sequel, Guanyin is called in to tame Monkey and bring him into
the fold of the One Vehicle.
Monkey's conversion here only replicates the earlier conversion of
the Four Heavenly Kings and anticipates more of the same. The
Heavenly Kings were the Vedic Atlases, holding up the four corners
of the heavens. Like Siva and Durga or Apollo and Mithra, they were
demoncrushers, their icons depicting them stepping on and subduing
these chthonic beings; once converted, the Heavenly Kings trampled
down the Buddha's earthly enemies. In the novel they help subdue
Monkey. Nata (Natha), the first-born of the first Heavenly King,
battles Monkey and proves to be his equal, but cannot defeat him. It
is at this point that Erlang, Monkey's old nemesis with a proven
record of effectiveness, is called in to do the job (in this case, a
Buddhist figure defers to a native folk hero, and, for a change, the
pecking order favors the latter).
Following his conversion in journey, Monkey repeats this drama,
becoming himself a Nata who, in the name of the Buddhist Law, fights
off other pagan demons all the way from China to India. The demons
seek to harm the pilgrims, but in the standard warfare of one-to-one
combat Monkey either smashes the unrepenting head demon, converts it
to observance of Buddhist ahimsa (!), or brings the vanquished being
into the Buddhist faith, at which point the demon's underlings
convert en masse. These new converts then repeat Monkey's career,
vowing to defend the Dharma against other demons. Such is the
never-ending tale of the triumphant spread of the gospel, whether
Buddhist or Christian.
It is in this larger context of a missiological myth that the
transformation of Monkey from imp to pilgrim should be read. The
change is not unreasonable, so that Dudbridge's search for
precedents in tales of pious monkeys and of animal troupes under
Mulian is not entirely necessary. These tales are not irrelevant,
but they are less relevant than what White has unearthed in his
study, Myths of the Dog-Man (1991). It is not possible to relate all
of White's encyclopedic findings here, but what he basically shows
is that all civilizations at some point consider the barbarians
living outside their borders to be less than human. Often these
people are imagined to be half-animal, i.e., Dog-Men. For being so
"totally Other," they both attract and repel. The same attitudes
apply to their societies, which are viewed as either utopian or
barbaric. To these subhumans, much as to the minorities within our
midst, are attributed both savagery and romance. Like blacks in
White America, they can be either glorified as "noble savages" or
charged with an exaggerated sexual prowess that leads them, as rumor
would have it, to "rape our women" (White 1991, 1-10). Their society
being deemed lawless by the standards of the civilized critics, they
are at once demons to be killed, animals to be enslaved, or pagans
waiting to be converted. What concerns us is the last option, which
has given rise to myths about the Dog-Man becoming the Christian
missionary's vanguard.
The story is told, over and over again, that as the early
evangelists ventured into the unknown spreading the gospel, they
intruded deeper and deeper into the "forest." To help prepare the
way, God or the angels would prepare the way for them by appearing
selectively to certain aliens and readying them for their eventual
discipleship under the missionaries. These then became the first
converts, guides, and protectors of the faithful. A number of such
enculturated aliens qua native missionaries have been recorded. The
most outstanding example of a jungle-beast-turned-saint is Saint
Christopher (nowadays the patron saint of travelers), originally a
barbarian represented as a Dog-Man (halfdog, half-man; a man with a
canine head). Monkey is no dog but he comes close enough. This
simian is the Ape-Man, Tarzan, and (as my students in class pointed
out to me) a venerable King Kong. He is the Buddhist St.
Christopher.
The careers of St. Christopher and of Monkey are in this sense
comparable. The history of China's perception of alien races
parallels that which White traces for the West. Classical China too
knew the distinction between city and village; Confucius, for
example, lived and worked in the city - that is, among civilized men
(the gentlemen) - and would have little to do with the inferior men
who inhabited the villages. Like Socrates, he was more concerned
with humans than animals: when a stable burnt down, he inquired
about the people present, not about the horses. Beyond the Chinese
villages lay the barbaric horde, nomads on horseback. They were
worse than the peasants and only slightly better than the wild
animals. Classical China recognized two rings of such barbarians
living in the four directions beyond China proper. The inner ring
was semicivilized, and could become Chinese. The outer ring was
truly barbaric.
This outer ring consisted of a race of men with names the characters
for which all contained the dog radical. They were subhuman,
half-animal beings who were little romanticized about until the Han,
when, as in the contemporary Roman Empire, a new cosmopolitanism
began to change that perception. Although the negative image of the
uncouth barbarian persisted, there was in Han China also a new
fascination with the exotic places that lay outside the Han
imperium, faraway lands beyond the double rings of barbarians. East
and west held the promise of being the land of the immortals. China
was drawn to reports of the fantastic and monstrous, as Rome was
with similar "monstrations" (monere) - both saw them as warnings
(monare) from above, or as "omens and auspices" sent by Heaven
(White 1991, 1). In Han China, these became the mythic lands of the
Shanhaijing [Character No Conversion] [Classic of mountains and
waters].
Hills and streams - chaos by another name - were regularly the
domiciles of monstrous beasts and protean dragons. As danger was
found there, so might be paradisiacal lands and alternate social
orders. Europe had its share of such mythic kingdoms. One such
remote kingdom that supposedly harbored a race of Dog-Men has
survived on our maps as the Canary Islands off the western coast of
Africa. In China, there were the Land of the Gentlemen to the east
and the Kingdom of the One-Legged Giants to the west. The
intentional exaggeration of social traits and anatomical features
helped sharpen distinctions, and was one way to better classify
categorical realities. It also served to highlight alternative
life-styles by holding them up like a mirror to ordinary reality.
What would correspond to the myth of the Canary Islands in the
western sea would be the isles of the immortals off the eastward
coast of China. Monkey, our Dog-Man in ape's clothing, was king over
one of these paradisiacal isles in the Eastern Sea. His Flower-Fruit
Mountain was an Eden regained, with blossoms that never faded and
fruits forever in season. The mountain itself was a clone of Tai
Shan [Character No Conversion], China's world mountain. It was the
conduit between Heaven and Earth, and housed the chambers of Hell
below. Since the mountain touched Heaven, Monkey claimed for himself
the same status, calling himself "The Great Sage on a par with
Heaven." His regime was, by the standards of the Confucian Heaven,
lawless. Monkey ruled with proverbial Taoist wuwei[Character No
Conversion] - laissez-faire, non-action, or non-ado. His island's
celebration of natural anarchy was bound to clash with Confucian
order and upset the hierarchy of Name and Rank in the court of the
jade Emperor. And this trickster did turn the world of the jade
Emperor upside down, much to the delight of any Taoist reader of
this text.
In time, though, Monkey turned from Titan to Saint. As a Titan he
was crushed "between a rock and a hard place"; as a prospective
saint he was released by Guanyin to become a protector of the
Buddhist pilgrim Tripitaka. We scholars may think of Monkey as
nothing more than a literary creation, but the common folk of China
know better. To us, a text is just a text, but to them journey is
more than fable: it tells of reality. The Sage Equal to Heaven is a
living reality, as real as St. Christopher is to an old-time
Catholic. As St. Christopher still protects travelers, Monkey still
answers prayers. Monkey has his own temple; he was worshipped and
prayed to as a god by the history-making rebels of the Boxer
Rebellion. This Great Sage is still present to those who have eyes
to see and ears to hear. We will return to this issue of his ancient
reality in the final section of this essay. Let us now turn to his
enlightened career.
Part 3: A Monkey of a Sixth Patriarch
There is a famous Zen koan (meditation problem) that is relevant to
our discussion of Monkey:
Do dogs have Buddha-nature?
No.
This koan is the first in the Zen collection known as the Wumenguan
[Character No Conversion] [Conversion No Conversion] (Jap. Mumonkan
[Gateless gate]). I used to see it as extending Buddhahood beyond
the realm of the human mind, where the anthropocentric position of
Hongzhou Zen [Character No Conversion] had restricted it. Now
White's study on the Dog-Man (1991) puts a new twist to it, for it
is possible that the word "dog" did not refer to animals but to
"subhuman" barbarians. If so, the question raised is whether
non-Chinese are also capable of enlightenment. Can barbarians be Zen
masters?
The question is not as silly as it may seem, because in South China
the Yao and Man tribes actually did trace their ancestry back to a
Dog Prince - southern barbarians were, in a certain sense, "dogs."
And in Zen history the question of whether such "dogs" possess
Buddha-nature had indeed been raised, in no less a text than the
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. The story is that Huineng
[Character No Conversion] (613-713), a boy from the South and the
future Sixth Patriarch, was out gathering firewood one day when he
chanced to hear someone chanting the Diamond Sutra. Awakened on the
spot, he asked the cantor about it and was told that he could learn
its truth more directly from Hongren [Character No Conversion]
(601-74), the reigning Fifth Patriarch. Journeying north to see
Hongren, Huineng was asked upon his arrival from whence he came.
Upon hearing the boy's place of origin, Hongren wondered aloud
whether a southern barbarian could ever hope to be enlightened.
That set the stage for Huineng's famous rejoinder. He supposedly
said, "In terms of place of origin, men may indeed be of North or of
South. But as to their possessing Buddha-nature, no such division
exists."(16) Hongren recognized the boy's innate wisdom, but
nevertheless sent him out to do menial work as a laborer in the
monastic compound. Later, when Hongren was seeking a Dharma heir,
Shenxiu [Character No Conversion] 605? - 706), his leading disciple,
composed a verse that said:
The body is the bodhi tree,
The mind is a mirror bright.
Daily and with diligence wipe it
Let no dust upon it adhere.
When told of this, Huineng composed a rejoinder that proved he was
the better of the two:
Originally there is no tree of Bodhi
Nor a mirror with a stand.
From the beginning nothing exists,
Where can dust adhere?
Seeing this poem, Hongren sent for Huineng and transmitted the
Dharma and the patriarchal robe to him. This he supposedly did in
secret, at midnight. He thereupon told Huineng to go back south for
his own safety. This story was well known by the Sung era, and
whoever compiled Journey must have known of it.
What concerns us is this: when read more closely, it will be noted
that when Hongren characterized Huineng as a "barbarian" from the
South, the Chinese word rendered in English as "barbarian" is
actually the word for a species of monkey. That is because the
civilized northern Chinese viewed the southerners as dogs, or, in
this case, as monkeys (a near synonym). So in this exchange between
Hongren and Huineng, the question was, to wit:
Can a southern barbarian, or "monkey," have Buddha-nature?
(The answer was) Yes.
In a sense, this exchange anticipated the Zen koan about whether
dogs - another nickname for southern barbarians - have
Buddha-nature. The answer to this latter question might be "No," but
that No might be a comment on the questioner's presumption: there is
no North versus South, no Man versus Dog/Monkey, as far as
Buddha-nature is concerned.
The Platform Sutra is significant here because there is a real
possibility that, if Huineng was an enlightened "southern monkey,"
Monkey could well have been intended as an enlightened Huineng. That
is to say, the whole narrative about Monkey's initial enlightenment
under the patriarch Subodhi might have been consciously modeled on
the enlightenment of Huineng under Hongren. Since the episode of
Monkey's apprenticeship under Subodhi - a Taoist master who taught
Monkey the power of transformation and the magic of immortality - is
not found in the folklore of either the White Ape or the Sage Equal
to Heaven, it is possibly the work of its final compiler, who, as
mentioned above, was quite likely familiar with the Platform Sutra.
The episode is pivotal because it did much to humanize this simian:
Monkey became more human as he beat out the human disciples of
Subodhi in acquiring the Dharma from his master. This demiurge
acquired his powers not by birth but, in the old-fashioned way, by
earning them. We love him more for this.
The name of his master, Subodhi, is clearly a take-off on that of
Subhuti, the guardian of the Mahayana wisdom mentioned in the
Diamond Sutra. Since this scripture taught sunyata (emptiness), it
is fitting that Monkey should awaken to his identity as Sun Wukong,
Monkey Awakened to Emptiness. And just as Huineng stole the Dharma
from the northern master Shenxiu, his cultural superior, so Monkey
stole the transmission from his superiors, the human disciples of
Subodhi. Zen purists may point out that Monkey comes in a poor
second compared with Huineng, and his enlightenment is indeed a
humorous parody. This parody, though, is not without its share of
Zen wit. We are dealing with "folk Zen,"(17) but then even classic
Zen was, almost from the start, indebted to such folk wisdom. The
popular text of the Platform Sutra itself took over much folksy
material that had found its way into
the Baolin zhuan (801).(18)
Not everything in Monkey's journey to enlightenment is modeled after
Huineng's. Monkey's journey to find Subodhi is rather unique - and
peculiar. Monkey goes from east of China (the Eastern Continent) to
the Western Continent (where Subodhi lived) by first stopping over
in the Southern Continent (i.e., India). This somehow involves
mixing the Chinese cosmography of the Nine Continents (nine boxes in
a 3 x 3 square) with the Indian Sumeru cosmography (based on a
cross-and-circle pattern). Try as I might to come up with a
reasonable package of the two, I cannot see how Monkey could have
made the journey the way he did. The text has Monkey traveling
northwestward by boat from his Aolai Island east of China and
landing on the northwestern coast of the Southern Continent. Finding
India too hot and the people too gross with passion, Monkey
transverses that land, crosses another ocean, and arrives on the
Western Continent. But there is no way a northwestward journey from
east of China could ever end up in a southwestward India. The only
explanation I can come up with is that for some reason the compiler
of Monkey reversed the route taken by the Indian Monkey King
Hanuman, who crossed from the southeastern tip of India to
southeastward Sri Lanka.
Once Monkey arrives on the Western Continent, his story more closely
parallels that of Huineng. Soon after arriving he encounters a
woodcutter; Huineng was either a woodcutter himself or met such a
hidden sage. The woodcutter that Monkey meets sings the secrets of
the Taoist Yellow Court Classic, a text that is to Taoism what the
Diamond Sutra is to Buddhism. Huineng was awakened by the latter
text and thereby led to Hongren; Monkey is awakened too but makes a
comic fool of himself by worshipping the woodcutter, mistaking him
for an enlightened master. The woodcutter hastily refuses the homage
and sends Monkey to Subodhi. At their initial meeting, Subodhi
doubts Monkey's worthiness as a student, as Hongren did Huineng's.
Subodhi thinks Monkey is a liar, for, he believes, no one could
possibly have made the long journey from Aolai. Finding out that
Monkey in fact did make the trip, Subodhi asks his surname. The word
for surname is
xing in Chinese, but this word can also denote "temperament" in
general or "nature," as in "Buddha-nature" (fo-xing ). Monkey
thought the question concerned his (monkey) nature or temperament,
so he answered:
I have no xing. If a man rebukes me, I am not offended; if he hits
me, I am not angered. In fact, I just repay him with a ceremonial
greeting and that's all. My whole life is without ill temper. (Yu
1977, 81)
Yu takes the word xing in the last line to denote "(ill) temper."
The lack of xing then means that Monkey had no ill temper - even
when abused, he just played dumb. Philologically, Yu's translation
is correct. But his very polish obscures a fine point about Monkey's
claim to having fo-xing, or Buddha-nature. Waley's translation is
less polished but his colloquial rendition better captures this
"folk Zen" flavor:
I never show xing. If I am abused, I am not at all annoyed. If
I am hit, I am not angry; but on the contrary, twice more polite
than before. All my life, I have never shown xing. (Waley 1943,
19)
Monkey had never "shown xing." In colloquial Chinese, this means
shengxing which connotes the acquisition by man (not by monkeys)
of normative, social behavior.
Since Monkey had misunderstood the question, the Patriarch hastens
to correct him - he was, he says, inquiring about Monkey's surname,
not about his (dumb monkey) nature. Once more, Waley's folksy
translation better captures the tone of the original:
"I have no family," said Monkey, "neither father nor mother."
"Oh indeed," said the Patriarch. "Perhaps you grew on a tree!"
"Not exactly," said Monkey, "I came out of a stone." (Waley
1943, 19)
It is upon learning of Monkey's extraordinary birth that Subodhi
recognizes Monkey for his worth. This is a cosmogonic being, one
born of chaos and nursed by Heaven and Earth.
This initial exchange may seem merely humorous: Monkey's initial
answer ("I have no xing") was due to a misunderstanding; his amended
answer ("I have no name") seems a non sequitur. But actually there
is much Zen wisdom in this. In Zen (as in Taoism), the values of the
world are often turned upside down and the wise often
appear foolish (thus D. T. Suzuki was named Daisetsu , "great
fool"). Monkey's first answer makes him seem a nitwit - that monkey
of a description of himself is his being himself. But when he
further clarifies the situation with his second answer, he truly
shows his "naturalness." He is, to use an American expression that
the Taoists would applaud, "a natural." This child of nature is as
nameless as nature itself.
Names came with culture; they are what man (Adam) labeled things
with. But before men so named things, there was the Tao, and that
Tao was Nameless. Laozi characterized it as the "uncarved block."
Monkey was born of that uncarved boulder. This offspring of the Tao
had no human name, nor had he a human nature. People get angry when
insulted because they have a sense of right and wrong and possess a
sense of pride. So, as Mencius noted, even a hungry beggar would
rather starve than eat a bowl of rice kicked across the floor to him
by a spiteful donor. Only dogs take whatever food is given them, and
only monkeys are doubly eager to please when they are made fools of.
Yet by not being civilized in the ways of men, Monkey kept intact
what Zen calls his "original face (the face of nature) before he was
born." Monkey
was tianran , spontaneous like heaven.
In the Hongzhou Zen of Maxu Daoyi (709-88), to be natural
is to be one with the Way. This school gave us the Baolin zhuan,
which incorporated folk wisdom as Zen wisdom. It also rewrote the
so-called Transmission Verses, poems supposedly composed by the Zen
patriarchs to mark the transmission of the teaching. The original
Transmission Verses in the Platform Sutra tell of Bodhidharma coming
to China "to sow the seed of enlightenment" so that five generations
later, the seed would bear an upright, five-petaled flower in
Huineng. The patriarchs in between supplied the conditions necessary
for this blossoming: they provided the soil, the warmth, the
moisture, and the care that brought the seed to flower.
The Baolin zhuan redacted these verses and one of its lines well
describes Monkey himself. By dropping all reference to the old
"seed-conditions-fruit" (i.e., causative analysis), it glorified
Buddhahood as a natural given. There is no need to wait for the seed
of wisdom to bloom. Why? Because ultimately there is neither xing
(nature to nurture)
nor sheng (seed to germinate). Buddha-nature is wuxing yi
wusheng (neither innate nor nursed). That describes Monkey,
who had "no nature to show." This nameless orphan is somehow the
Unborn (a pun on anupatti-dharmaksanti). He is sunyata itself.(19)
Monkey acts the fool but is no fool. This becomes evident soon
enough. Made to work in the garden, as Huineng was, Monkey sees the
truth one day when, standing at the back of the hall, he hears the
Patriarch lecture. Monkey scratches his ears, rubs his jaw, and
grins from ear to ear, antics that remind us of a disciple of Mazu
who, after Mazu kicked him into enlightenment near the water, was
unable to stop laughing. And indeed Monkey, enlightened by the
lecture, is soon dancing on all fours, to the amazement of the
unenlightened lot. Later Monkey steals to the Patriarch's room at
midnight and receives the secret transmission. But because he shows
off his talent too publicly - he turns himself into a pine tree (a
symbol of immortality) to entertain his fellows - Monkey too is sent
homeward by the Patriarch, as Huineng was by Hongren. Read side by
side, the stories of Huineng and Monkey run a remarkably similar
course.
But the two lives soon diverge. Upon his return home, Monkey uses
his newly acquired powers to eliminate the demon who took over his
kingdom in his absence. He then coerces the Dragon King into giving
him the Wish-Granting Rod for a weapon. Soon afterwards he deletes
names from the register of death in hell, and later, steals the
peaches of immortality from the garden of the Queen Mother of the
West. Puffed up by pride and egged on by the small monkeys, Monkey
declares himself "Equal to Heaven." Demanding his rightful place in
the sky, Monkey gets himself an official post. He happily strolls
about Heaven, a Taoist natural whose Confucian gown wears badly on
him. Though still a good-tempered fellow, he is not always
courteous, since he never quite learned the decorum of civilized
men. He then blows his top when he discovers that the Jade Emperor
has hoodwinked him with the empty title of "Royal Stable Hand." In
his rage, Monkey nearly brings Heaven down.
Although he is never malicious - this is his redeeming trait - we
still have to wonder: What happened to his good nature, his claim to
being never "annoyed even when provoked" nor "angry when struck"?
Something is amiss - his awakening to sunyata under Subodhi was
somehow incomplete. He needs a second journey to the West to truly
find himself. Somewhere in this likable imp lurks a demon with a
deep-seated grievance against Heaven. It appears that before Monkey
can turn from Titan to Saint, he has first to take on Heaven.
The Titans were Greek Chthonians who were pushed out of Mt. Olympus,
attempted a last revolt against Zeus and company, lost, and were
banished forever to the lower regions of land and water. Legacies of
the Mycenaean era, they survived as Medusas and Cyclopes. The latter
herded sheep on outlandish islands, still refusing to bow to the
rule of Zeus or heed Odysseus's request for basic (Zeus-sanctioned)
hospitality.
However, this type of Titanic revolt was rarely postulated in China.

It is true that the Shang dynasty (c. 1500-100 B.C.E.) worshipped a sky
god, while the prehistoric Xia dynasty that preceded it worshipped
dragons, snakes, and tortoises, and that these Xia gods were
apparently demoted to the lower, watery regions during the rise of
the Shang
"high ancestor" called Shangdi , the Lord on High. And just as
Zeus fathered the noble houses of Greece, Shangdi fathered the royal
lineages of Shang and Zhou. Both did so by mating with a female
ancestress (one of Shangdi's mates swallowed the egg of the
sun-bird, while the other stepped on a giant bird's footprint). The
Chthonians of Xia that preceded Shangdi and the kings of Shang and
Zhou he fathered usually replicated themselves autochthonically,
much as old Kronos and Uranus did.
Monkey is rock-born and thus of this autochthonic species. His
birth is similar to that of Pangu , the "Coiled Ancient"(20) or the
giant who burst from a world egg. Pangu pushed one half of the egg
up and the other half down, and they became heaven and earth. Monkey
was Pangu reborn; heaven and earth nursed him. He also came out with
all his faculties complete, in the manner of the Buddha (like the
baby Buddha, Monkey also claimed that there was no one equal to him
on earth).
Though heroes are deserving of such cosmogonic births, the last
figure in Chinese history reputed to have been born from a rock was
Qi , son of Sage-King Yu and the true founder of the Xia dynasty
(which, as mentioned above, once worshipped the Chthonians). Qi's
birth from a rock resulted from the disobedience of Yu's wife. Yu
had ordered her not to intrude upon him during his Herculean labor
of stemming the Flood. When she did, she saw Yu in his animal form -
a three-legged tortoise - and fled in fear, turning herself to stone
when Yu gave chase. Yu demanded his son. The pregnant stone burst
and Qi (meaning "beginning," "dawn," or "first light") was born.
This episode has been interpreted variously as a female breaking the
taboo of a male initiation rite or as a lunar myth involving death
and rebirth, but the core is nevertheless about an autochthonic
birth. Earth, as Mother, swallowed her sons only to give birth to
them anew at the beginning of the new year. All Xia rulers were born
in this way: Yu himself was born of Gun, who was also able to change
himself into the mythic three-legged turtle. A turtle in its wintry
hibernation is an inanimate rock. In spring the turtle (Gun) is
believed to give birth to the dragon (Yu). A turtle intertwined with
a snake is still a Chinese symbol of life and death - it is the Dark
Warrior of winter conjoined to the Green Dragon of spring.(21)
The Greek Chthonians recycled themselves between Kronos and Uranus.
Zeus put an end to that by killing his father Uranus; then, by his
many amorous affairs, he initiated the Age of Men. In China the Xia
gods also recycled themselves until the sky god, Shangdi, put an end
to that by fathering the house of Shang. Subsequent to this we do
not hear of stone-born kings until we come to the fabled birth of
Monkey, who ruled his island outside China proper much as the
Cyclopes did. Monkey presumably could have ruled there forever had
he not decided to take on Heaven; in that sense, his act constitutes
a belated Titanic revolt. We will offer further evidence for the
existence of a conflict between sky gods and earth deities in the
Appendix; to introduce this material here would lead us too far
afield. Meanwhile we will pick up the story from where we left off,
namely with the Stone Monkey's running amok in the citadel of
Heaven.
Part 4: The Prehistoric Face, of Monkey
Having wrought havoc in heaven, Monkey storms out and, with regal
spite, returns home. The Jade Emperor calls on all the help he can
summon in order to make Monkey pay for his unforgivable
transgressions, but Monkey is able to fight off his attackers until
Erlang, his old nemesis, joins the fray. Erlang can match, one by
one, Monkey's seventy-two transformations of the Earthly Multitude.
Protean strength is thus pitted against Protean strength. It is a
no-win situation for Monkey, so, during a breather between bouts, he
takes flight. After a number of changes, Monkey tries one final
masquerade in an attempt to trap Erlang.
Rolling down the mountain slope, he squatted there and changed into
a little temple for the local spirit. His wide-open mouth became the
entrance, his teeth the doors, his tongue the Bodhisattva, and his
eyes the windows. Only his tail he found to be troublesome, so he
stuck it up in the back and changed it into a flagpole. (Waley 1943,
68)
If Erlang walks in the temple door, Monkey can swallow him alive.
But the flagpole gives Monkey away - Erlang has seen many a temple
before, but never one with a flagpole sticking up at the back.
Seeing through Monkey's disguise, he vows to "smash down the windows
and kick in the doors." Fearful of having his eyes blinded and his
teeth knocked out, Monkey escapes just in time.
This episode allows us to see the original face of this little
monster. The flagpole tail, the gateway mouth - these give away more
than even Erlang knows. They put Monkey back in time, back into the
company of some very ancient Chinese deities. We will begin with the
tail because it makes an infamous appearance in European mythology
also, being the telltale trait that the Devil, Satan, shares with
the little devil Monkey. In medieval Europe, exorcists could reveal
the Devil for what he was by exposing his tail. This tail is one of
the traits that the Devil inherited from certain of the early
Chthonians (such as his cloven hooves, also shared by the satyrs of
old). The Devil's serpentine tail goes back to the snake in the
Garden of Eden, while the Devil's trident goes back to Neptune. The
trident, an ancient symbol of power (de) and of the "coincidence of
opposites," is associated with Poseidon, brother of Zeus and a Titan
who rode the waves on a sea serpent (dragon), trident in hand. This
pre-Olympian deity left his mark (three holes) at Delphi where his
trident once struck, long before Apollo claimed Delphi as his own.
Monkey's flagpole of a tail not only gives him away, it also ties
him to an ancient species of Chinese Chthonian. Sky gods like Zeus
or Shangdi, as the reputed ancestors of man, are naturally
anthropomorphic, while the earlier Chthonians, being prehuman, are
naturally zoomorphic. The prehistoric Xia dynasty knew these
demiurges of theirs as "snakes, turtles, and dragons": Yu was a
dragon; his father Gun was a turtle; and his son Qi, born from a
rock (an inanimate turtle shell), still had tiny green dragons
dangling from his ears. Nowadays we might not believe that we
descend from such watery animals - Darwin has taught us to look to
the ape as our ancestor instead. But even so, mankind won its
distinction from the simian lot by losing fully and finally the
monkey's tail. To have or to grow a tail is to regress to this
prehuman form.
Fish, snake, dragon, and turtle all share the common trait of a
tail. Three of these creatures are still represented in modern
Chinese calligraphy as having tails turned upward towards the
sky.(22) Here are the characters (note the rising end of the lower
right-hand lines):
snake turtle , dragon ,
In Shang and Zhou ritual bronzes, the serpentine tail coils itself
counterclockwise. Like circular animal bands found on other ancient
artifacts from other early cultures, the counterclockwise movement
symbolizes the path of the moon. (The clockwise path is solar; the
popular yin-yang circle still follows the lunar path.) In Chinese
myth, that up-turned tail is associated with a chthonic defiance of
Heaven. This is indicated in a number of fragments of ancient myths:

-the tortoise Gun, who stole the magical earth from Heaven, dragged
its tail behind it;
- Wei-tuo, the marsh spirit, stood tall like a chariot's mast (see
Appendix);
- Cripple Shu, a Turtle-Woman in Zhuangzi 5, wears a pigtail
pointing upwards;
- Monkey pokes a hole in heaven with his magical rod and sticks his
flagpole tail up with similar insolence.
In a future article, I will explain how this tail goes back to the
myth of the famous "one-legged Qui" (Yizhu Qui ). Morohashi's
Daikanwa jiten offers a Ming-Qing picturesque rendition of Qui as a
cow standing on one hind leg. This, however, is silly. What "one
leg" originally indicated was simply seminal life, wiggling germ,
incipient motion. One-legged Qui is the Ur-Being of all beings,
taking, on land, the form of a land animal (thus the cow); in water,
that of a sea creature (thus the snake-fish); and in the air, that
of the one-legged Qui phoenix. This is the Great One, Laozi's mystic
female, and the mother of all things.(23) The one-legged often walks
with a limp: it is incipient movement seeking mature mobility. Since
anything primeval should be one-legged, Fuxi and Nugua, China's
first divine couple, are regularly given intertwining, serpentine
tails in ancient tomb carvings (see the earlier discussion on the
gao-long). Nor is the myth of the One-Legged unique to China: in the
West, we know this seminal human in the person of Oedipus, the
"swollen-legged," son of Laius, the "lame" (in the Bible, Jacob,
after wrestling with the angel, also walked with a limp). In China
the same father-son Laius-Oedipus relationship is found between Yu
and Gun. Yu was the dragon who danced on one leg; his father Gun was
the mythic three-legged turtle.
The meaning of the myth of the sacred cripple is too complex to
unravel here. Suffice it to note that with the rise of the
anthropomorphic sky gods, the cripple, once prized, was deemed to be
- in Biblical terms - an abomination to the Lord. But in older,
chthonic cults, to be incomplete was to be on the way to completion.
As with the moon that waxes and wanes, a crippled being is a potent
being. It is Becoming itself. What is now remembered of the Titans -
that they were "deformed" and "monstrous" - was perceived
differently in their own time. They were not Beast, but Beauty
incarnate.
Like the single tail or the single leg, the single horn ("unicorn")
carried the power of beauty and seminal life. This is the reason
why, in my earlier discussion of Li Bing, I prefer to see him as a
rhino instead of a cow or a water buffalo, even though the word
refers to all three (and actually the Chinese rhino is
double-horned, with a full front horn and a stubby secondary one).
The rhino's horn is potent: it connotes seminal life and is highly
prized as an aphrodisiac (like the deer antler). The Chinese still
kill the animal to procure this horn. Furthermore, the rhino is
armored like the turtle and is likewise amphibious - a desirable
trait for China's liminal (draconic, transformative) species. Rhinos
once roamed central China; they were known to the Shang, and can be
seen in a beautiful Shang ritual goblet sculptured in the
naturalistic shape of a rhino at the Palace Museum in Taipei.
When Monkey stuck up his tail as a flagpole, it both gave away his
chthonic identity and belied his Titanic insolence. But Monkey's
mouth, masquerading as the door of the shrine, is iconographically
just as telling. Hoping to eat Erlang alive, Monkey turned his mouth
into the "portal of death." But "portal of death" is the namesake of
his totemic cousin, Ximen Bao, the Leopard of the Western Gate. The
West, where the sun sets, is the gateway to death and paradise; the
Dog of Hades stands guard there. In China, the role went to the
leopard. Since food offered to the dead had to go through this
gateway (i.e., this animal's mouth), the Shang used to roast meat
over a bronze tripod decorated with the dautie , an animal mask made
up of two leopards in profile facing one another. As a single,
frontal, animal mask, it is a picture of half a gaping mouth topped
by an angry-looking upper face: Known in this form as the monster
Insatiable, it is believed to devour everything, including itself.
The name, however, reflects a Confucian judgment of this Shang
glutton's demand for endless sacrifice. In truth, the dautie is just
another persona of the gao-long, the snake that bites or swallows
its own tail. It is an alias of the Great Mother, Kronos, Uranus,
the Dark Warrior, the Sphinx, and the Queen Mother of the West (in
her most primitive tigress form).
Thus when Monkey turns his mouth into the door of a shrine and the
"portal of death" to swallow Erlang, he is again regressing to his
primeval form. Monkey is the dautie, the mask of a Xia god,
condemned since the Zhou as a vampire and a cannibal - an agent of
Death instead of a giver of (cyclical) Life. Monkey's masquerade
expresses this fall from grace. By the Han, the dautie design, once
so prominent, had declined, often ending up as a crude drawing above
the entrance to a tomb, precisely what Monkey had turned his own
insatiable mouth into.
This is not an uncommon fate for the old chthonic gods. In India an
equally insatiable "Face of Glory" is stationed outside temples,
supposedly to scare away the evil spirits. In Rome, the griffin was
the guardian of the sarcophagus (which means "meat-eater"). In
medieval Europe, gargoyles likewise crouched watchful on eaves. In
Egypt, Anubis the Jackal - Dog-Man by another name-witnessed the
weighing of souls. In Buddhism, Mara the Devil holds samsara in his
jaws. In Tang China, a pair of life-size hounds with human heads
(and sometimes single horns) stood guard near the dead.
Admittedly, the animal mask of Shang employed the leopard, not the
monkey, so we still have not accounted for the rise of Monkey in
this dance of death. I have tried, but have not been able, to find
monkey designs on early Shang and Zhou bronzes. It was only in the
Han that monkey figures appeared on sizable numbers of tombs.
Yet ancient China must have known the existence of monkeys. The
oracle bone script for one-legged Qui may well be a picture of a
monkey standing on a single leg holding onto a branch. A close
relative of the same Qui character yields something called a "mother
monkey" , thought to represent the form of Shun , a high ancestor of
the Shang, and possibly linked to that monkey subspecies mentioned
in the Platform Sutra. Among the Yue ethnic tribes in the south, Qui
is still remembered as a one-legged mountain monkey with the face of
a man and the body of a monkey, and gifted with a human tongue.
Darwinians should not object to this connection between man and
monkey, especially not when Peking Man is possibly the first Chinese
ApeMan.(24)
Our search for the original face of Monkey should not distract us
from his final destiny. Genealogy is only half the story. In his
second westward trip Monkey rises above his animal past, above even
humanity, to become a Buddha. In his first trip he acquired only
Taoist immortality, and discovered only his premoral, childlike,
monkey nature. Still capable of grudges against Heaven, Monkey loses
his good temper and is damned for his Titanic pride. Only on his
second trip West does Monkey, guided by the compassionate Guanyin,
find his true self, his Buddha-nature. Guanyin teaches Monkey an
invaluable lesson: that it is more important to tame the demon - the
"monkey mind" - within than subdue the demons without.
In that second journey to the West, Monkey learns the art of
Buddhist self-discipline. Guanyin initially puts a headband, a
"crown of thorns" as it were, on Monkey's forehead. The headband
gives Monkey insufferable headaches every time he harbors evil
thoughts. Mindfulness of good and evil eventually allows Monkey to
"Do good, avoid evil, and cleanse the mind." By journey's end,
Monkey is his own master, a victor over the demons within. When he
finally asks Guanyin to kindly remove the headband, Monkey is told
that it is not necessary. The crown of thorns had long since
magically disappeared. At last this protean Ape had grown, in his
progress as a pilgrim, into a Buddhist saint.

APPENDIX

Weituo and the Frog Folklore
The Duke of Ai asked Confucius, "I have heard of there being a
one-legged Qui. Is this true?" The master answered, "Qui is a man.
What is this about his being one-legged? His physical form is no
different from that of other men. It is only that he was so uniquely
gifted in understanding music that Yao said, ~Qui is such that one
(i - ) of him is enough (zhu ).' Thereupon he was made Minister of
Music. The gentleman thus says: Qui is sufficient as one (yizhu - ).
It does not mean that he has only one leg (yizhu - )." - Huainanzi
What is it that Walked on all four in the morning, Two at noon,
Three in the evening, And the more legs it has, the weaker it
becomes?
-The Sphinx's Riddle, from Oedipus Rex
If a European is asked if Oedipus was lame or "hard of walking,"
only one who knows the literal meaning of the name Oedipus would
dream of agreeing. Most would say, as Confucius said when he was
asked about the one-legged Qui [dragon] (yizhu Qui), "No, he was no
cripple. He was a man like you and I - just more virtuous
[heroic]."(25)
Likewise, most people would agree with the answer given by Oedipus
to the Sphinx's riddle: "It is Man." Few would consider the
possibility that the answer intended by the Sphinx was: "It is the
Sphinx." Yet that was indeed the original solution to the mystery of
life: namely, that men rose out of the four-legged kingdom, all sons
of the Great Mother. Metonym-wise, this rise of man is captured by
the design of the Sphinx itself: a hairless human face (the mark of
the naked ape called man) rising out of the torso of a four-legged
lioness. We are indeed born of the animal kingdom. As babies, we go
about on all fours, only later learning to stand upright (homo
erectus). First walking with an uneven limp, one leg being stronger
than the other, we progress to walking steadily on two. But in the
autumn of our lives, we hobble again on three (two legs and a cane)
before finally crawling on all fours back to the womb of Mother
Earth. From dust we come; to dust we return. This is the lot of man.
This was the intended answer of the Sphinx's riddle.
Oedipus, the "swollen-legged," was one-legged or seminal humanity.
In China, this role is given to one-legged Qui. Here the word "leg"
is a metaphor for growth. To this day, the Chinese and the Japanese
languages still use this character to mean "sufficiency." "Lack of
leg" means "not enough." A threesome in mahjong is still called
"short one leg," and to be satiated is literally to be "full of
legs." Confucius could read "one leg" as "one (is) enough" because
of this metaphoric usage, but, as mentioned, "one-legged" originally
indicated a seminal being. Qui was the seminal dragon, the Ur-Being
of all beings. When Laozi traced all things back to the One, he was
just demythologizing this One(-legged) into the abstract One and
calling it the Mother of All Things. Laozi, however, does not
mention Qui by name - only Zhuangzi does, remembering Qui vaguely as
a mountain spirit. But in the same paragraph where he recalls this
about Qui, he mentions a marsh spirit, a swarm thing, called Weituo.
He gives us this more detailed description:
The Weituo is as big as a wheel hub, as tall as a carriage shaft,
has a purple robe and a vermillon hat and, as creatures go, is very
ugly. When it hears the sound of thunder or a carriage, it grabs its
head and stands up. Anyone who sees it will soon become a dictator.
(Watson 1964, 125)
We will read between the lines of this quote to present a story of
the fall of this and other Chthonians in ancient China.
Since Weituo is said to be of the marshes, it is of water. Water
belongs to the lower regions when contrasted with the sky above.
Since all land rests on water in Chinese cosmography, water connects
with the subterranean ocean itself. Water goes with rain and has
natural ties with thunder. The Yijing [Book of changes] even
remembers thunder as "rising from the ground in the second month
(spring) and disappearing back into it in the tenth (fall)." This
nine-month period marks the farming season. Rain heralds it; rain
ends it. Even today, the Chinese character for thunder depicts rain
(coming down) over the fields. We will later see how the sound of
thunder might be tied to the croaking of frogs.
Thunder, however, can also be the sound made by the wheels of the
sun chariot as it rambles across the heavenly plain. Usually drawn
by four horses, the sun chariot has large wheels set on giant hubs.
When Zhuangzi remembers Weituo as being "as large as those hubs," he
is indicating its tie to the sun chariot. When he says the Weitou
stands "as tall as the chariot's shaft," he is referring again to
the sun chariot, but also pointing to the chthonic "one leg" or "one
upturned tail" that we linked to the Chthonians in the main essay
above. Whenever rain is imminent, this Weituo is said to "grab its
head and stand up," which is one way of saying that it becomes awake
and alert. In Shakespearean terms, he "stands to" (becomes erect).
That it "awakes" at the first sound of thunder (in spring) suggests
that the Weituo has been asleep (in the winter months).
One animal known for poking its head out at the same time of the
year is the tortoise, but the tortoise is more generally thought of
as an animal that slumbers through the winter. In China the creature
most often associated with waking up when spring comes is the dragon
(the Dragon Boat Festival in spring celebrates this rebirth of
life).(26) Thus the turtle of winter is succeeded by the dragon of
spring. This is told in the myth of Yu and Gun, where Yu the dragon
(snake) is said to be born of his father Gun the turtle. Yu is the
new life that rises from the old, which Gun is regarded as being
since the turtle essentially becomes a hard rock (a lifeless shell)
when it withdraws its head and limbs and hibernates. Sometimes,
though, this headless and limbless turtle can still wag its tail
outside its shell, and this is its "one leg" (this also constitutes
the "third leg" of the mythic neng turtle).(27) From this slumbering
turtle of winter, the one-legged dragon of spring is born.
The myth has an empirical base. Farmers can still attest to how the
turtle can foretell rain: it becomes "alert" when rain is near, it
"grabs its head" (pokes it out), opens its mouth, and drinks up the
raindrops. If the turtle Gun is remembered for poking its tail at
Heaven, it is because in defiance of Heaven, Gun once stole the
magical earth from Heaven and used it to stop the Flood, dragging
his tail behind him. When Zhuangzi rejected political office - he
preferred to be like the turtle resting in the mud - he was
recalling Gun's defiance of the imperial authorities.
Weituo the marsh spirit shared that defiant attitude - it too was a
Titan with a grudge against Heaven. We are told that Weituo was
ugly, had a purple robe, and wore a vermilion hat, and was a bad
omen since its appearance signaled the rise of evil kings. Purple is
the color of royalty, which means that Weituo was at one time a god
on high. Vermilion is the color of the sun-bird, so Weituo once had
a celestial home, only being demoted to the watery regions below
during the rise of more distinct sky gods. That suggests that there
was a race of Titans who ruled the sky in China before they suffered
a fate similar to the Chthonians of ancient Greece, pushed from Mt.
Olympus by Zeus and company. In that political turnover, the
Chthonians - once beautiful to their worshippers - became big and
ugly, like the Cyclopes. That Weituo was "big and ugly" too puts him
in the same league as these displaced Titans. A Xia demiurge, Weitou
was probably demoted during the Shang and the Zhou with the rise of
the new cult of Shangdi and Heaven. Since it was by the mandate of
Shangdi and Heaven that the virtuous kings of Shang and Zhou ruled,
Weituo, who championed the cause of the Xia and thus sided with the
evil ruler overthrown by the Shang, is naturally perceived as an
evil omen.
But what would Weituo actually look like if we ran into him in real
life today? Although he could be turtle or snake, the best candidate
offered us by the folklore of the Zhuang tribesmen in South China is
the frog. A perennial symbol of fertility, this lunar animal is
valued for its seasonal metamorphosis. Its stomach waxes and wanes
like the moon. Its belly groans like thunder. It comes alive in
spring and hibernates through the winter. For the Zhuang tribes now
living in central and western Guangxi , the frog is also their
totemic ancestor, their Shangdi. They still have myths that tell of
the frog as the agent announcing the coming of rain and prophesying
the fortunes of the harvest for the community.(28)
Every New Year is attended by a rite of hunting and sacrificing a
frog, a celebration that lasts for fifteen days. It begins on New
Year's Day with everybody out digging in the fields, looking for a
hibernating frog. The first man to find one is sure to have good
fortune for the rest of the year, and his catch is announced
throughout the village. A small coffin is then prepared and the frog
entombed in it, after which it is paraded through the village amidst
much merrymaking and general gift-giving. That night, everyone
attends a formal funeral for the frog. But first, the body of last
year's frog is exhumed. Based on its coloration, the fortune for the
coming year is told. If the bones have turned yellow, it means a
good harvest; if black, a bad one; if grayish, an average one. If
they are white, it means there will be a good cotton crop.
The ritual is more intact than the myths, which have apparently
suffered some corruption. Some totemic beliefs have been overly
rationalized. In one myth, for example, it is said that the frog was
the son of the thunder god. Whenever mankind needed rain, it had
only to inform the frog, and the frog, by croaking, would pass man's
request for rain to his father. The thunderclouds would then gather
and rain would fall. The croaking of the frog apparently acted as
sympathetic magic, imitating the thunder of Heaven that preceded the
rain. Originally the sacrifice of the frog was the sacrifice of the
tribe's totemic ancestor, its giver of life, rain, fertility, and
general good fortune.
But this sense of reverence has been lost in some redacted versions
of the myth, perhaps because men had trouble identifying themselves
with the frog as a fellow kinsman. Thus it is now said in one tale,
for example, that a certain family was mourning its dead when a frog
nearby joined in the chorus. Offended by its noisy croaking, one
family member grabbed a pot of boiling water (a wicked substitute
for the falling rain) and killed the frog with it. With the
messenger so killed, prayers for rain to the god of thunder went
unanswered. It was not until the people consulted their (human, not
frog) ancestors and learned the cause of the drought that amends
were made. Henceforth mankind showed filial respect to the frog and
gave it a decent burial every year to ensure that the rain would
fall. This is clearly a patched-up story, a broken and badly retold
myth about a totemic sacrifice. If, indeed, the mistake lay simply
in killing the messenger, why not stop the annual ritual killing
altogether?
The next two stories have been affected even more by secular
rationality. In one, thunder was plotting to strike a human hero (a
rewrite of the old ancestor). The frog, a general serving the god of
thunder (instead of being the god's son), leaked the secret to the
man. The hero then laid a trap, captured the thunder god, and
coerced him into sending rain. That the god did, but he was so
angered by the frog's betrayal that he has sought to strike frogs
dead with lightning ever since. A popular proverb now has man
boasting, "No frog in hand, no fear of being hit by lightning." The
other redacted tale, an explanation of the New Year's rite outlined
above, goes even further. Mankind now boasts of killing one frog,
and of threatening the thunder god with killing more if he does not
send rain. This is not worship, it is blackmail. These tales tell of
a mankind no longer fearful of the thunder god. As a result, the
frog ends up being a mere pawn in the struggle between man and the
natural elements.
The Confucian rationalization of the frog myth is complete in the
following tale. Once upon a time, the thunder god had decreed that
at death the old must allow themselves to be eaten by the young.
This cult of human sacrifice (a rewrite of the totemic feast) ended
when one filial (i.e., Confucianized) family secretly killed a cow
instead. The god was angry at the deception and sent the frog down
to spy on man and find out who innovated this practice. But the frog
was caught and forced to reveal to man the secret of how thunder was
made, which was by beating on a large bronze drum topped by four
carved frogs. This drum would send off lightning bolts. Learning
this, the family made a similar drum with six frogs, two more than
the god's. Beating the drum not only brought rain but also chased
the god of thunder away for good. Large, ancient, bronze drums with
four frogs on top have now been retrieved from archeological sites
in South China. The above story is now told at funerals even as the
shamans dance to modern versions of these frog drums.
In these frog tales, we see how an ancient Chthonian who used to
rule on high suffered during the rise of the cult of Heaven. First
it was demoted to the status of a fertility god in the marshes. For
some time, though, this totemic god could inspire fear in men by
withholding rain from the fields, before it suffered further
indignities as the myth was rewritten into mere folktales about the
unlucky frog.(29) The White Ape fared better in this regard. It at
least retained the virile power to seduce women. Not so the frog,
which lacks even enough potency (de) to qualify as an occasional
Frog Prince for a human mate.(30)

NOTES

(1.) I shall follow Waley in using the names Pigsy and Sandy for
easier recognition. Anthony Yu's translation includes many
invaluable annotations, another point in its favor. Henceforth in
this essay Monkey refers to Waley and the first seven chapters, and
Journey refers to Yu and the rest of the one-hundred-chapter version
of this text. (2.) For a general discussion, see Yu 1977, 8-12. The
tale, entitled "The Wife of the Monkey," is no. 30 in Eberhard 1965,
67-68. See also tale no. 18, 29-31; notation on Monkey King on pages
214 and 206; and further references therein. The Palace Museum in
Taipei has a large painting of a White Ape. (3.) Cited by Yu 1977,
9. (4.) The Buddhist Jataka tales contain many monkeys. Monkeys have
often been used for their imitative piety. But Mulian's troupe is
probably important for having provided the context for introducing
Indian acrobatics to the theatrics of the Monkey King Hanuman on
stage. (5.) As noted by Yu 1977, 10; found in chapter 66 as the
Great Sage of Water Ape. (6.) The two faces of the holy and the
demonic lie behind the actual double masks of the gods. Siva has
three, with the third uniting the other two. See later discussion on
the trident as a symbol of this union of opposites. (7.) There has
always been a relationship between the moon and the madness of
multiple transformations (or, nowadays, multiple personalities).
Water, as an extension of lunar myth (via the tide), is seen as
formless, chaotic, and too slippery to grab hold of. On the moon and
its mystique, see Eliade 1963, 154-87. Carl Hentze has done much
work on lunar myth, but his work is in German; for an example of his
approach in English, see Naumann 1982. (8.) A word of gratitude is
in order here. Anthony Yu alerted me in a private communication that
the novel knew of the possibility of a double for Monkey,
"especially in the comic episode of the ~Two Minds Disturbing the
Universe' in chapters 56-58." I had not noticed this. AFS editor
Peter Knecht also pointed out to me that monkeys can swim; I had
assumed that they cannot. The idea that Monkey could not swim might
be based on the Ramayana: Hanuman, the Indian Monkey King, unable to
swim from South India to Sri Lanka, climbed a hill, magically
expanded his body, and leapt across the strait. (9.) Waley
1943,17-100. This work is dated, of course. Graham, nevertheless,
uses a similar term: "potency" (1989, 13-15). (10.) See Wang 1983 (a
Chinese translation of Shirakawa Shizuka's collected essays in
Japanese), 35-47, for an overview of flood stories and their place
in the early culture of China. On Li Bing, see note 11. (11.) For
the exploits of Erlang, see Huang 1934. I am drawing on more recent
data unearthed by Xiao (1987), whose article covers Li Bing, the cow
and the river, Li Erlang, and, most importantly, Yang Erlang. My
reason for reading "cow" bull, water buffalo) as "rhinoceros"
(another possibility) will be explained in part 4 of this essay.
Anthony Yu, in a personal communication (16 August 1992), informed
me that the White Ape assumes the form of a monster who led the
Seven Fiends of Plum Mountain on the side of the Shang against the
righteous forces of the rising Chou (chapters 87-93 of the Fengshen
yenyi ). The Fiends were defeated by Nata and Erlang (under a
different name) in a manner resembling the duel in Monkey. (12.) See
Lai 1990. (13.) See Lai 1992. (14.) See Wang 1983, 64-69. He has
some observations on the leopard and the tigress that I missed in my
essay (Lai 1990). (15.) See O'Flaherty 1973. (16.) My translation
uses the later popular account - not the oldest Donghuang text -
since the popular text was what counted in the Ming-Qing period. The
idea that Huineng was a little boy comes from this later text. (17.)
"Folk Zen" is my term for a post-Sung genre of popularized Zen
wisdom found in the literature of Ming-Qing. Besides Monkey, we see
such folk Zen in works like Water Margin, Drunken Buddha, and Dream
of the Red Chambers. (18.) Popular culture upsurged in the later
Tang, after 755. The Baolin zhuan took in much folk wisdom, but then
much of Mahayana avadana literature too has a folk origin. The
distinction between elite wisdom and folk wisdom in literature can
be a precarious one, and ideologically motivated. (19.) See Lai
1984a, which explains how the verses were redacted by the Hongzhou
school. (20.) This is my liberal reading, based on the coiled
serpent in Shang libation bronzes. White (1991) Offers the more
accepted reading of the name. The most detailed study of this
southern chaos myth in English is by Girardot (1983). I take the
snake in the libation bronze to represent the awakening of the
dragon by spring rain. Nelly Naumann sees it as another lunar
symbol: the snake drinking from the water of life rooted in the
moon. See Naumann 1982, 16-23. (21.) On Gun, see Lai 1988, 28-36.
See also Allan 1990 and my review of her book in Taoist Resources
3/1: 73-82. (22.) On Gun and Yu, see Lai 1984b. For the fish mask
that goes with Qi having two dragons dangling from his ears, see Lai
1990. There are other pictograms in Chinese for animals with tails,
but, in both the animal designs on ancient bronzes and in Chinese
calligraphy, the tiger's tail does not point upward and the bird's
tail is always tucked in. (23.) On the Qui, see Ching and Guisso
1991; certain of the essays are relevant to the discussion here,
though the authors tend to accept the later readings of the dragon.
See especially Raymond Dragan's "The Dragon in Chinese Myth and
Ritual: Rites of Passage and Sympathetic Magic" on pages 135-62.
(24.) The material in this paragraph is taken from Wang 1983,
118-19. (25.) I will present a more detailed analysis of the
One-Legged in a future essay, tentatively titled "Unmasking the
Cripples in Zhuangzi 5." (26.) The Dragon Boat Festival actually
falls in summer, so the intertwining of snake and tortoise is as
much "summer and winter" as it is "spring libation and fall
sacrifice." (27.) The neng is three-legged, which is a metaphor of
the amphibious animals that can walk on land and also swim in the
water. The bird (a waterfowl) is also three-legged. To come up with
the count of three, count the front fins of a sea turtle and the
paddling feet of a duck as two, and add the "pulled-together" hind
legs of the former and the tail of the latter as the third leg.
(28.) Materials for this discussion are taken from Nan 1987. See
this issue of Asian Folklore Studies for my review of the PRC
journal that Nan's article appears in. (29.) Nan (1987) sees the
Zhuang as originally fishermen, whose totems, when they were still
living farther north, were the fish and snake. There are records of
such a totemic tribe in the south; people there "cut off their hair
and tattooed their bodies with fish scales so that as they swam in
the waters, they would not be bitten by fish and snakes." (I myself
see this as the source of the Xia myths about Yu and Gun.) But Nan's
theory requires him to postulate that the Zhuang tribesmen adopted
the frog as their totem after they stopped fishing following the
introduction of agriculture to the area. I find such drastic changes
in ancestry unlikely, even inconceivable, since the frog totems can
be traced to frog drawings on the prehistoric red pottery of
Yangshou. The author also uses a more Marxian reading, seeing the
decline in potent frog stories as resulting from man's increasing
dominance over nature. I prefer to remain with the symbolic paradigm
shift, with Heaven and humanism (Zhou) rising at the expense of the
Chthonian Xia). The latter was then valued for its fertility role
but condemned for its blood sacrifice. (30.) The Frog Prince is a
survival of the memory of the frog as a fertility deity and as an
ancestor. The Dog Prince is by far the more widespread lore in South
China. See White 1991 and Girardot 1983.

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