南山大王折岳連環洞 · 53
Leaf 53 of the pilgrimage · 艾叶花皮豹子精 The Mugwort-Spotted Leopard
Southern Mountain King 南山大王
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 艾叶花皮豹子精 “The Mugwort-Spotted Leopard”
He calls himself King of the Southern Mountain, and that is the insult Wukong answers: even the Buddha sits below a bird, even Laojun takes the lower chair.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 85
Three Decoy Kings in One Armour
分瓣梅花計A rank-none demon proposed the plan: pick three able subordinates, dress them in the king's helm, armour and pestle, engage the three brothers separately in three places, and let the king come down out of the air with five steel claws and take the monk.
- ch. 85
The Five Steel Claws
五爪鋼鉤It worked exactly as designed. The three brothers each thought they were fighting the king; when they met again the monk was gone, taken out of the air by five steel claws off a horse he was not even riding.
- ch. 85
The Woodcutter Under Sentence
山人思親In the back garden the monk found a woodcutter tied to the tree beside him, three days already under sentence, whose only grief was an eighty-three-year-old mother no one else would feed; they wept together over who had the worse of it.
- ch. 86
A False Head of Willow Root
柳樹根頭The vanguard, flattered into the post for inventing the ambush, cut a willow root into a head, daubed it with human blood and served it on a lacquer tray — addressed to Great-Sage Grandpa, which alone stopped the attack at the gate.
- ch. 86
The Tossed Head That Rang
撲搭不響Wukong's test was sound: a real head thrown out of a hole falls without noise, this one rang like a clapper on the stone, and the staff broke it open on the spot. So the demons fetched a genuine one out of their flaying pavilion, saved up for housekeeping.
- ch. 86
The Head Buried with Willow Wands
權為松柏Bajie buried the head on a sheltered slope, planted willow branches for cypress at the sides, and heaped smooth pebbles in front as the meal — to show a living heart's filial piety. When the monk walked back alive he dug the head up and raked it to pieces for having been wept over, then buried it again.
- ch. 86
Listening from the Beam
梁上聽話Wukong went into the sealed cave as a winged ant and stood on the main beam, where the demons argued whether to steam, boil or salt the monk — which settled whether he was alive. Then he put a drowsiness-worm in every face, and a second pair up each nostril of the king.
結局 The ending
Bound in the four-hoof knot and carried out on Wukong's shoulders, he took one thrust of Bajie's rake half awake and came out of the shape as a spotted mugwort-leopard, nothing else. The woodcutter fetched broken bamboo, withered pine and hollow willow, Bajie fanned the fire with his ears, and the cave burned empty. Walking them out he said: less than a thousand li hence is Tropic Kingdom.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials