This chapter starts with a public execution and ends with a banquet. While the two might seem distasteful when combined for modern sensibilities, ancient peoples didn’t feel this way. Ancient Romans often served up public executions while the stadium floor was being prepared for the next gladiatorial match or chariot race. Bread and circuses also came with capital punishment.
As for the punishment of death for stealing some lousy peaches, we should remember that Sun Wukong took a job and joined heaven’s organization before committing high treason by going to war against the throne. As we shall see in Chapter 9, ancient cultures did not take usurpation lightly. But even without the whole fighting heaven thing, and setting aside the fact that he stole from the Queen Mother, the Monkey King would likely have gotten the death penalty anyway because he perpetrated what in the pre-modern era was mostly taken to be a capital offense: the abuse of duties entrusted to a person in good faith. Back then, people did not take their word lightly, and a promise was sacred. Hence, breaking them came with deadly consequences. In the eyes of ancient peoples, this wasn’t just theft from your employer, this was taking their resources and goodwill, and betraying that. These bonds had to be fiercely upheld precisely because they were so easily broken and, once broken, could easily lead to social dissolution and chaos.
All of which presents a real conundrum for the forces of heaven, since Monkey King has mastered immortality and had it bolstered by the property he stole–peaches of immortality and elixirs of long life. So they ruin a great many axes, thunderbolts, and firestarters on the attempt before Lao Tzu brings out his brazier.
What’s the deal with braziers? They’re kind of a catch-all term for a variety of ancient Chinese appliances that don’t really have an English equivalent. The term is used to refer to those big incense-and-ash-holding pots you see in Chinese temples, as well as the furnaces that alchemists used to distill the elixir of life. Lao Tzu used his brazier for the latter.
Placing of the Monkey King in the brazier used for immortality elixirs also has a symbolic meaning. We’ve explained elsewhere how Sun Wukong is an archetypal representation of the impulsive, egoistic sides of our consciousness (hence his demanding to be equated with heaven and being unable to control his desire to eat peaches, etc.), and how the forces of heaven can be seen as a rough correlation with our superego, i.e. our higher impulses towards order and control. We’ve also examined how alchemy not only aimed to create elixirs of immortality externally by ‘purifying’ toxic substances like mercury in their great braziers, but they sought to purify their own souls through similar practices by using their bodies as braziers. Trying to burn away the monkey king, then, is like trying to destroy our monkey mind through ascetic practices and self-remonstration. Something Buddha himself was said to have tried before realizing that enlightenment could only come through other means.
Needless to say, Wukong breaks out and he is not happy. Alone and friendless, the Monkey King becomes determined to usurp the Jade Emperor’s throne. Artistic interpretations of the following scenes vary from the stately:
To downright apocalyptic:
Things get so bad that Buddha himself intervenes. Buddha in this world has become one with the universe such that him and God are pretty much the same.
So Buddha makes his famous wager: leap out of my palm, and the heavenly kingdoms will bow to you. Of course, what Sun Wukong doesn’t realize until it’s too late is that Buddha’s palm is the universe. Try as we might, there is no escaping reality through ego and tricks alone. And Monkey King’s ultimate undoing would seem to be a symbolic demonstration in the novel of the hierarchy of religion according to Ancient China. Whereas, in the west religions fought it out for supremacy (even going so far as to feature legends of Jesus besting Norse and Gaelic gods in wrestling matches), in China we get myths like this one. A monkey masters Taoism and is able to defeat all the forces of that religion and Confucianism combined, which is why we ultimately need Buddhism and what it has to teach us in order to tame our own monkey minds. More on this in my other blog.
For more on the graffiti that the Monkey King makes on Buddha’s finger, check out this excellent post at Journey to the West Research.
Fun fact: the mountain that Buddha’s palm becomes in order to pin monkey in place is real! Here’s a picture of Five Finger Mountain in Hainan:
The five phases correspond with the Chinese view of the earthly elements: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. These were also the five ‘phases’ that alchemists believed matter passed through. That it would be the five phases that ultimately hold Monkey King down is symbolically saying that he bears the weight on his shoulders! Of course, Buddha being compassionate and merciful also allows room for hope, and we are left with a prophecy that foretells of the great voyage to come. Until then…
Journey on!