灵感大王通天河水府 · 34
Leaf 34 of the pilgrimage · 靈感大王 The Inspiration King
Inspiration King 灵感大王
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 靈感大王 “The Inspiration King”
He bought a village's children with good weather and turned out to be a pet that had floated up to listen too much.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 47
A Boy and Girl Each Year
年年祭祀At Chen Village a boy and a girl are still dressed and papered each year for the king's table; Wukong and Bajie take the children's places on the altar, giving their names, Chen Guanbao and Yi-cheng-jin, back to him.
- ch. 48
A Frozen River for the Monk
寒風大雪An aged fish in his council suggests the winter trick: a cold wind, a heavy snow, and the whole river frozen, so that the monk will walk on the ice instead of sailing.
- ch. 48
The Monk in the Stone Chest
石匣藏僧The ice opens and the monk is carried to a stone chest behind the palace — the size of a pig trough, six feet long — where he sits weeping and composing verse about water disasters until morning.
- ch. 49
The Basket Cast Upstream
魚籃現身Guanyin arrives at the river with her hair still unpinned, ties her basket to a ribbon off her own jacket, casts it upstream, chants seven times and draws out one gold fish, still blinking.
- ch. 49
The Fish-Basket Drawn in the Mud
傳影魚籃Somebody in the village kneels in the mud and sketches her exactly as she stands there unfinished, and the novel says that drawing is the original of the fish-basket Guanyin.
結局 The ending
Bajie and Sha go down and find the whole water court dead and rotting already; the monk comes out on the back of the river's old soft-shell turtle, who asks to be remembered at Spirit Mountain. That errand is forgotten, and it drowns the last scriptures at the book's final river. The fish itself is not killed: it goes home in the basket, alive.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials