铁扇公主翠雲山芭蕉洞 · 41
Leaf 41 of the pilgrimage · 羅剎女 The Rakshasi Lady
Princess Iron Fan 铁扇公主
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 羅剎女 “The Rakshasi Lady”
She can put out a mountain fire or put a monkey clean out of the country, and the novel's complaint against her is only that she will not lend the one.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 59
One Wave of the Iron Fan
一扇萬里She opens on the subject of her son — Red Child of the Fire Cloud Cave, taken to serve at the Southern Sea — and one wave of the fan sends Wukong tumbling; only his power to sit on a cloud saves him from the full eighty-four thousand li.
- ch. 59
The Wind-Stopping Pill
定風一丸At Little Sumeru, Lingji gives him the one present the Buddha left him that had never been opened: a pill that roots a man where he stands against any wind.
- ch. 59
Hidden in the Tea Foam
茶沫藏蟲With the pill held in his mouth he enters as a gnat through the door-crack and settles under the foam of the tea; she is thirsty, drinks two long pulls, and he is inside her.
- ch. 59
Bargaining from Inside Her Belly
腹中講價He speaks out of her own body and asks again for the fan; she promises anything if he will leave by her mouth rather than the other way, and gives a leaf which the Flame Mountain's land spirit at once calls a fake. One fan and the fire leaps a thousand zhang higher, and scorches the hair on Wukong's arms.
- ch. 60
The Sizing Words for the Fan
口訣相吐Drunk and delighted at her husband's return — actually the monkey on her husband's stolen beast — she spits the fan from her mouth at the size of an apricot leaf into his hand and tells him the words that make it big.
- ch. 61
The Real Fan Carried Out
四十九扇Beltless and in mourning colours she carries the real fan out of the cave herself when the army leads her husband past her gate in a rope through the nose, begging her to send it.
結局 The ending
The only honest settlement on this stretch of road: Wukong, who would gladly keep the fan, is shamed by his own promise and hands it back. She had told him forty-nine fans end the fire for good, and it rains on the Flame Mountain for the first time in the book's memory. She folds the leaf to an apricot, keeps it in her mouth, and the text says she came to a fruit of the path.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials