蜘蛛精盤絲嶺盤絲洞 · 47
Leaf 47 of the pilgrimage · 七情 The Seven Passions
Spider Spirits 蜘蛛精
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 七情 “The Seven Passions”
Wukong refuses to strike them: a staff stirred through that pool would foul the rod and sink his name. So the seven sisters get through the afternoon bruiseless.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 72
Strung Up Like the Immortal
化齋被綑The monk went alone to beg food at a village too tidy to be true, found a girl at each of seven looms, and was hung from a beam by three cords, back up and belly down — a posture the captors called an immortal pointing the way.
- ch. 72
The Bathing Pool of Seven Fairies
濯垢泉The land-god, summoned and trembling, said the spring three li south had been the bathing pool of seven fairies, who gave it up without a fight; the sisters used it three times a day and were on their way to steam the monk.
- ch. 72
The Hawk and the Clothing Rack
餓老鷹Wukong came down as a starving hawk and took all seven changes of clothing off the rack in the pavilion, leaving the sisters ashamed and naked in the water, and then refused to do anything else at all.
- ch. 72
Bajie Blundering into the Web
八戒忘形Bajie volunteered to finish it, was met with a web that put the daylight out and trip-lines in every direction, and got up perhaps twenty times, falling on each one differently.
- ch. 72
Seven Kinds of Insects Swarm
七樣蟲Each sister kept a sworn son — bee, gadfly, silk-fly, biting fly, ox-fly, grasshopper, dragonfly — and when they swarmed one into ten and ten into ten thousand, Wukong's hairs became seven kinds of hawk and cleared the sky.
- ch. 72
Burning Silk-Web Cave to the Root
斷根Bajie wanted the house pulled down; Wukong said pulling was hard work and got the rotten pine, split bamboo and dry vines instead, and the Silk-Web Cave burned with the pilgrims already on the road.
- ch. 73
Seventy Clones with Forked Staves
打爛蛛形Out of their burned home the seven ran three li to a fellow student's abbey and told on the pilgrims. Wukong set seventy hair-clones on them with forked staves, and beat them to a pulp on the abbey floor, ten-odd jin of silk raked off behind them.
結局 The ending
They die in someone else's quarrel. In the abbey doorway their bodies revert to seven spiders the size of a peck measure, curled up and begging, and the abbot they called brother comes out and says he wants the monk for himself and cannot save them. Wukong asks the land-god what they were, is told what he already knew, and burns both establishments.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials