Wukong had gone back to Flower Fruit Mountain. His master had sent him away a second time, and this time he had written out a letter of dismissal.
Something happened on the road while he was gone. Somebody exactly like Wukong appeared, knocked Sanzang down and took the luggage and the travel papers.
Wujing went to Flower Fruit Mountain and Wukong was sitting up in the high seat. And he did not know who Wujing was.
The One Who Made His Own Disciples
Four monkeys were lined up in front of him. One was Sanzang and one was Bajie, and Wujing and the white horse had been made up as well.
He was reading the travel papers out loud. “I will go west and bring back the scriptures.” He would go by his own hand and take the merit as his own.
Wujing tried to seize the luggage and was driven off. What he had seen was Wukong’s face, and the voice, the walk, the grip on the cudgel were all the same.
The Two of Them
The real one came, and the two fought. They fought above the clouds and over the water, and neither pushed the other back half a step.
Still locked together they went to the southern sea. Guanyin stood them in front of her and said the tightening spell.
Both grabbed their heads at once. Both rolled on the ground at once, and Guanyin stopped the spell and said nothing.
Nobody Can Tell Them Apart
Heaven came next. Li Jing turned the demon-revealing mirror on them, and inside the mirror there were two monkeys.
They went down to the underworld. Yama turned to the monkeys’ entry in the register of the dead, and it was the entry Wukong had struck out five hundred years before.
There was no name to check against. What he erased then had become the absence of any proof of himself, and the underworld sent them out the way they came.
They stood in front of Sanzang too. He had walked fourteen years beside one of them, and he could not tell either.
The One Who Knew the Name
Last of all they went before the Tathagata. He did not make them compete. “That one is a six-eared macaque.”
There are creatures, he said, whose names are barely known. Six ears, so it hears everything said in the world, and what it hears is how it becomes somebody else.
At the naming, that one ran. Wukong went after him and brought the cudgel down, and that was the end of it.
Today, You Are Not Present at Your Own Verification
Wukong never once proved himself in this chapter. Strength came out even and the face gave nothing away, and the man who had walked fourteen years beside him could not tell.
The test built to confirm him only hurt him. The spell dropped them both and told nobody anything. The mirror and the register did the same.
Telling apart always happens from the outside. The one being sorted only stands there and does not take part, which is why the innocent side ends up enduring the test longer.
Enduring is not the same as being cleared. And yet we regularly call the two by one name. “Well, you had your investigation” is that name.
The Tathagata did not run one more test. He simply knew what the creature was called, and some things need a person who knows before they need a power that sorts.