Not long out of Chang’an the road turned bad. Demons came down on the party in a mountain pass, and both attendants were killed and only Sanzang was left.
An old man appeared and untied him, then became a cloud and was gone. It was the Great White Planet.
After that Sanzang walked alone. A hunter took him across one mountain, and even the hunter would not cross the border beyond it.
The Voice Under the Mountain
He came to a place where two ranges met, and a sound came out of the ground. “Master. Master.”
Sanzang looked around, startled, and a monkey face was wedged in the rock. Grass had grown up over the top of its head.
“Five hundred years ago I threw Heaven into an uproar. The Bodhisattva Guanyin left me here to wait. Get me out and I will take you all the way west.”
Sanzang asked what he was supposed to do. “There is a paper at the summit, and only you can peel it off.”
Five Hundred Years Under One Sheet
Sanzang climbed the mountain, and on the rock at the top was a paper of gold characters. Wind and rain had never taken it down.
He lit incense and bowed, then reached up and lifted the paper away. What nobody had moved in five hundred years came off like that.
Sanzang is a man without power. He cannot use a blade or a spell, and what a palm had pressed down, a fingertip released.
The mountain split and the earth fell in, and a monkey walked out of it. He knelt down and called him master.
Six Killed and a Road Walked Off
Days later six bandits came out on the road, held up knives and demanded the baggage. Wukong smiled and stepped forward.
He put all six on the ground. Not one of them was breathing, and then he gathered up the packs and came back as if nothing had happened.
The color went out of Sanzang’s face. “How can you kill men like that? We are going to save lives, not take them.”
Wukong flared up. “And if they had killed you?” Sanzang went on rebuking him.
Wukong could not stand it. “Then go without me.” He took his cloud and was gone in an instant.
What the Old Woman Left Behind
Sanzang sat down at the side of the road. He could not carry the baggage and walk, and then an old woman came up to him.
She had a coat over her arm and a cap in her hand. “They were my son’s and there is no use for them now. Put them on your disciple.”
She taught him a short spell as well. “If the boy will not listen, recite this.” Sanzang repeated it a few times.
Then she turned into light and rose. It was Guanyin. Sanzang put the coat and the cap into the pack.
Try It On
Wukong had gone to the dragon king of the eastern sea. The dragon king showed him an old painting of a young man picking up a shoe three times.
“If he had not endured that, he would have become nothing.” Wukong looked at the painting for a long while, then went back without saying anything.
Sanzang did not scold him. He gave him food and opened the pack, and the coat and the cap came out of it.
Wukong’s eyes went straight to them. “Master, may I put those on?” “If you want them, wear them.”
He pulled on the coat and set the cap on his head, and Sanzang quietly began to move his lips. The band bit into the flesh.
Wukong rolled on the ground trying to pull it off, and it had already become part of him. When Sanzang stopped speaking, the pain stopped.
Today, the One Who Frees You Is the One Who Binds You
For Wukong that was the first day in five hundred years. It was the day he came out and the day the band went on, so freedom and restraint arrived together.
The people are worth more attention than the objects. The one who got him out and the one who hurts him are the same man, and Sanzang carries both jobs at once.
We bring people in too. The bringing in is not the whole of it, and the hard conversation afterward has to come from the same mouth.
Hand it to somebody else and the relationship splits in two. There is the person who gave you good things and the person who tightens, and after that nothing the tightener says gets heard.
Wukong walks from that day on wearing the band. Nobody yet knows what day it comes off, but the one who takes it off is the one who put it on.