黄眉大王小雷音寺 · 43
Leaf 43 of the pilgrimage · 黃眉大王 The Yellow-Brow Great King
Yellow-Brow Great Demon 黄眉大王
In Journey to the West 西遊記 (c. 1592) · a demon on the road west · nicknamed 黃眉大王 “The Yellow-Brow Great King”
He wanted no flesh and no territory; he wanted the incense, and for two chapters, a long way short of Spirit Mountain, he got it.
The great deeds 大事記
- ch. 65
The False Mountain Gate
假設山門A gate and a hall appear on the right road with arhats, friars and saintly listeners lined up at the rails; the monk insists on going in and kneeling, and the thing on the lotus throne calls the pilgrim by name to make the bow complete.
- ch. 65
Clapped Under Golden Cymbals
金鐃合頂Wukong is shut up head to foot in a pair of gold cymbals with no seam left to show light; the twenty-eight mansions come down from the Jade Emperor's order and spend the night pushing, levering and heaving at a thing that will not shift.
- ch. 65
A Horn Through the Cymbal Seam
亢角透縫The Dragon of the Neck makes her horn a needle and drives it through the join with all her thousand jin of strength; Wukong comes out of the hole she made, and one blow of the club finishes the cymbals.
- ch. 66
The Sack That Took the Gods
搭包裝神A white cloth sack comes off his shoulder and goes once round the field: the twenty-eight mansions, the five guards of the doctrine, then the turtle, the serpent and the five dragons borrowed from the patriarch of Wudang, all of them carried off and penned in a cellar.
- ch. 66
Lured Down to the Melon Field
瓜田熟瓜Maitreya sets up a grass hut and plants a melon field at the foot of the slope, tells Wukong to lose deliberately and run him down to it: every other melon there is green.
- ch. 66
The Melon That Was the Monkey
還我金來The boy eats the ripe melon that is the monkey, and inside he works the intestines and turns headstands until the whole field is rolled flat as a threshing floor; Maitreya reappears in his own shape, laughing, and takes the sack off him with one hand.
結局 The ending
He is folded into his master's own bag, and the last dispute is about the metal: Maitreya sweeps the cracked gold of the smashed cymbals off the lotus stand, blows immortal breath on it, and walks home with a whole pair. He takes the blame and then shares it — careless with a servant, yes, but the pilgrims' tribulations were not spent, so a hundred spirits had to come down and be caught.
The book itself: why the monkey was pinned, which translation — The 500 years · The translations · The 81 trials