五行山下

English (for the teacher)

Now, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven had stolen the immortal peaches and helped himself to the golden elixir, and when he was smelted for forty-nine days in Lord Laozi's elixir furnace, it only gave him a pair of fiery golden eyes. The moment he leapt out of the furnace, he swung his golden-hooped staff and fought his way across heaven right up to the Hall of Divine Mists, scattering the gods in every direction. A hundred thousand heavenly soldiers and generals were at their wits' end, and the Jade Emperor, helpless, could only issue a decree and send messengers to the West to bring the Buddha to subdue the demon.

The Buddha stopped the Great Sage and asked: "Where are you from, demon monkey, that you dare to run riot here?" The Great Sage, not the least bit afraid, answered in a loud voice: "I am the Great Sage Equal to Heaven of Water Curtain Cave on Flower Fruit Mountain! As the saying goes: 'Emperors take turns; next year it's my house.' Just tell the Jade Emperor to move out and hand heaven over to me, and that will be the end of it; if he won't, I'll make sure heaven never knows a day of peace!"

The Buddha gave a cold laugh: "What abilities do you have, to dare to seize heaven?" The Great Sage said: "I've mastered the seventy-two transformations, and one somersault takes me a hundred and eight thousand li. Why shouldn't I sit on heaven's throne?" The Buddha said: "In that case, let's make a wager: if you can somersault out of the palm of this right hand of mine, you win and heaven is yours; if you can't jump out, you go back down to the world below as a demon, cultivate yourself for a few thousand more years, and then come and argue."

The Great Sage snickered to himself: "What a fool this Buddha is! One somersault takes me a hundred and eight thousand li, and that palm of his isn't even a foot across. How could I fail to jump out?" He asked quickly: "Will you keep your word?" The Buddha said: "I will, I will!" With that he opened his right hand, which looked about the size of a lotus leaf.

The Great Sage leapt up, landed in the Buddha's palm, and shouted: "I'm off!" With one somersault he was off, and in an instant he vanished without a trace. As he flew, he suddenly saw five flesh-pink pillars holding up a column of blue-green mist. He thought to himself: "This must be the end of the road. First I'll leave a mark here, so I'll have something to say to the Buddha when I get back." So he pulled out a fine hair, blew his magic breath on it, turned it into a writing brush, and wrote a line of big characters on the middle pillar: "The Great Sage Equal to Heaven was here." When he had finished, with no dignity at all, he peed at the foot of the first pillar as a souvenir, then turned his Somersault Cloud around and flew straight back to where he had started.

Standing in the Buddha's palm, the Great Sage said: "I've been to the end of heaven and come back again. Hurry up and ask the Jade Emperor to give up heaven!" The Buddha scolded him: "You pee-soaked monkey! You never once left my hand!" The Great Sage wasn't having it: "I left my mark there. Do you dare come and look with me?" The Buddha said: "No need to go. Just look down."

The Great Sage opened wide his fiery golden eyes and looked down, and there on the middle finger of the Buddha's right hand was written "The Great Sage Equal to Heaven was here", and beside the thumb hung a whiff of monkey pee. The Great Sage went pale with shock: "I clearly wrote it on a pillar holding up the sky, so how did it end up on his finger? I'll never believe it! I'll go once more!"

The Great Sage sprang up to leap out again, but the Buddha turned his palm over and swept down, pushed him out through the Western Gate of Heaven, turned his five fingers into five linked mountains of metal, wood, water, fire and earth, named the Five-Element Mountain, and pinned him under it with the lightest touch. The Great Sage poked his head out from under the mountain and still tried to struggle, so the Buddha took a seal from his sleeve, with six golden characters on it, and had it stuck on the mountaintop. At once the mountain took root and its cracks closed up; only the Great Sage's head and two hands still stuck out, and he could never break free.

The Buddha also summoned the local earth god and instructed him: "When he is hungry, give him iron pellets to eat; when he is thirsty, give him melted copper to drink. When his days of punishment are over, someone will naturally come to save him."

From then on, the Monkey King drank copper when thirsty and ate iron when hungry, through wind and sun, and his time under the mountain stretched to five hundred years. He did not yet know that five hundred years later, a monk from the eastern lands would set out for the West to fetch the scriptures, and would pass right by this mountain. Only then would the monkey who had lain pinned there for five hundred years see the light of day again.