白骨精白虎嶺屍魔 · 25
Leaf 25 of the pilgrimage · 白骨夫人 Lady White Bone
White Bone Demon 白骨精
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 白骨夫人 “Lady White Bone”
She never fights anybody. She is already a skeleton, and in three costumes she gets the monk to write out the expulsion of the only one of them who can see her.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 27
The Circle Drawn on Ground
畫地為圈Wukong drew a ring on the ground with his staff, told the monk not to step outside it, and went off over the hill to find a house that would give them food.
- ch. 27
First Stroke on the Village Girl
初打村姑A young woman came up the path with food for a husband working in the fields. One stroke, and she threw the body away and got off the hill as a fly.
- ch. 27
The Old Woman Sent Again
再打老嫗An old woman came weeping for the daughter she had not got back. The second stroke left another shed corpse, and the monk began to shout.
- ch. 27
The Old Man's Third Death
三打老翁A white-bearded old man came along reciting scripture. This time Wukong had the ridge-gods and land-gods posted in the air to watch, so there was nothing to shed, and he ended her.
- ch. 27
A Name Written on the Spine
脊骨留名What lay on the road was a pile of bones, and down the spine was written a name: 白骨夫人.
- ch. 27
The Dismissal in the Monk's Hand
親筆貶書The monk wrote the dismissal with his own brush, and Bajie supplied the obvious theory that the corpses were the monkey's own conjuring.
結局 The ending
Killed outright on the third stroke, and nothing comes to collect her: no bodhisattva, no star, no master missing a servant. That is the point of the leaf. She is a corpse that had been bleaching on a dead hill until it learned to talk, and the pilgrimage's worst hour follows her — the monk alone on the road with a pig, and taken at Wave-Moon Cave with nobody left who can see through anybody.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials