They stopped for a night at a monastery. While they ate a sound came from the back building, and it was a woman’s voice.
The monk waved a hand. He said she had been there for a year and was not right in the head.
Sanzang looked that way once. The sound stopped soon after, and nobody asked anything more.
The voice in the back building
That night Wukong went around there alone and looked in through the gap in the door. A woman sat facing the wall.
Her clothes were poor and her hands were not, he thought. She turned and said the same thing she always said: that she was the princess of this country.
The monks came after him and led him away. They said she had been saying it for a year, and that they had listened for the first few months.
The one sitting in the seat
They entered the city the next day and people were packed along every street. It was the day the princess threw the ball from the tower.
One embroidered ball flew and struck Sanzang on the head. People closed around him where he stood.
He was taken into the palace and the king was delighted. The princess laughed from behind her screen.
Sanzang said he was going for the scriptures and it did not carry. The seat had already been assigned.
What Wukong saw
Wukong stayed in the palace and watched her, and there was nothing human in the air around her. Yet neither the king nor his ministers thought anything of it.
These were people who had been beside her for a year. They greeted her daily and said her name daily, so none of them ever looked again.
The only one who had seen the woman in the back building was Wukong. That side took him a single day to find strange, and it was the people close by who could not see it.
What came down from the moon
Wukong named her in front of everyone and she ran from the palace and made for the hills. She turned and fought with a pestle.
When the fight ran long the sky went bright and the Lord of the Moon came down. Chang’e stood beside him.
He said she was the jade rabbit who pounded medicine on the moon. She had slipped down a year ago, he said, to settle a blow from a former life.
The rabbit went back to her own shape and rose into the moonlight. That was the end of it.
The one who came back
They went to the back building of the monastery, opened the door and brought her out. She had forgotten how to walk.
The king ran out of the palace, knew his daughter, and sat down where he was. For a year nobody had called her by her name.
The monks stood in the yard. They were the ones who had carried her meals all that time, and not one of them had gone to check what she said.
Today, when words are not evidence
In this country the real one was talking the whole time. She did not hide and she did not run, and she said the same thing all year.
The reason it never counted as evidence is simple. She had no seat, and nothing gets checked when it comes from somebody with no seat.
There is something worse. Repeat a true thing long enough and the repeating becomes evidence. It becomes evidence that the speaker is not right in the head.
The one in the palace never had to prove anything. There was no need, and being greeted every morning did the proving for her.
The false one was not caught by anyone in that country. It ended only when somebody came down from the moon, and on the human side nobody ever went to check what she said.