Sandy

W est and west they walked, the monk Tang Sanzang on the white horse, Wukong ahead, Pigsy grumbling under the luggage, until the road ran out at the edge of a river so wide the far bank was a rumor. Eight hundred li of it, the water a strange dead weight — no current, no waves, only a heavy stillness. A goose feather dropped on that water would not float; it sank like a stone. They found a tablet on the bank with the river's name and four lines of warning cut into it, and stood there stuck, because there was no boat, no ford, and no way a man on a horse was getting across. Eight hundred li of the Flowing-Sands stretch, three thousand fathoms of weak water deep. A goose feather will not float upon it; a reed flower sinks straight to the bottom. So ran the verse on the tablet at the river's edge. Master and disciples came to the bank and saw the boundless water, and could find no way over.

The water heaved and split, and something came up out of it. Red hair flying loose, two round eyes burning like lamps, a face neither black nor blue but a bruised indigo, a voice like thunder rolling in a drum. He wore a goose-yellow cape, a belt of white vine, and strung at his throat — this is the part to notice — a necklace of nine human skulls. He came straight for Sanzang with a great staff, and the monk would have been snatched off his horse and into the river if Wukong had not grabbed his master and bolted up the bank, leaving Pigsy to drop the luggage and meet the thing head-on. A single head of red flaming hair, wild and loose; two round eyes shining bright as lamps. A face not black, not blue, but indigo-dark; a voice like thunder, like a drum, an old dragon's roar. He wore a cape of goose-yellow, his waist bound with twined white vine. Beneath his chin nine skulls were hung, and in his hand a treasure-staff, rugged and grim.

Pigsy was made for this. Whatever else the pig demon was — gluttonous, lazy, forever eyeing the exits — he had been a marshal of the heavenly river once, and water was his home ground. He hauled out his nine-tooth rake and met the ogre wave for wave, the two of them churning the river to froth, twenty rounds and then thirty, neither giving an inch. Up on the bank Wukong watched and itched. He could not stand to be left out of a fight. They came at each other back and forth, and fought a full twenty rounds without deciding it; back and forth again, thirty rounds, and still neither was the stronger. Bajie and the monster were evenly matched in the water, the river boiling between them.

“He had drowned nine holy men and hung their skulls at his throat. The tenth band came carrying the one name that would stop him cold.”

So Wukong jumped into the fray — and learned why he had been left on the bank. Water was the one place his powers came up short. To move underwater at all he had to clench a spell and chant a charm just to keep from drowning, or else change himself into some fish or crab, and either way he could not throw his real strength behind the iron rod. He settled for swooping down on the ogre from above, snatching at him from the air. The ogre took one look at that whirling rod and dove straight back under, down where Wukong could not follow. Up came Wukong empty-handed. Down stayed the ogre. They did this for a long while, and got precisely nowhere. Wukong said, this business in the water — I am not much at home in it. If I just walk down there I have to pinch a spell and keep chanting the water-averting charm the whole way, or else change into some fish or shrimp or crab to go at all. Out of the water he was matchless, but in it he could not bring his full power to bear; so he struck from above instead, and each time the monster simply dived back into the river where he could not be reached.

There was nothing for it but to fetch help. Wukong somersaulted off to the Southern Sea and laid the whole mess before Guanyin — the unfordable river, the diving monster, the standoff. And the bodhisattva, who tends to know things before you tell her, only smiled. That ogre, she said, is no random monster. He was already spoken for. When she had gone east years ago to arrange this very pilgrimage, she had stopped at that river, converted the creature in it, and given him a religious name against the day the monk would come. His name is Sha Wujing — Sand, Awakened to Purity. He is waiting for you. He just does not know yet that the waiting is over. Wukong went to the Southern Sea and told Guanyin all of it. The bodhisattva said, the monster of the Flowing-Sands River is the Curtain-Raising Captain come down to earth; long ago I converted him and enrolled him in the faith, and gave him the religious name Sha Wujing, to wait there and accompany the scripture-seeker west. He has been waiting all this while.

Guanyin sent her own disciple down to close the matter — Mokṣa, called Huian, the capable young monk who runs her difficult errands. She gave him a red gourd to carry and told him exactly what it was for. Down he came to the riverbank with Wukong, stood at the water's edge, and called out across the heavy water the one word that mattered. Wujing. Not a battle cry. A name. The bodhisattva called her disciple Mokṣa, also named Huian, gave him a red gourd, and sent him down with Wukong to the Flowing-Sands River. There Mokṣa stood on the bank and called the monster by his religious name.

The ogre, mid-fight, heard his name spoken from the bank — his real name, his given name, the one the bodhisattva had laid on him — and everything changed at once. He stopped. He recognized the voice as Guanyin's own disciple, parted the waves, and put his head out, and the moment he saw who it was the fight went out of him completely. He threw down the great staff, swam to the bank, and bowed his head to the ground. All this time, he said, I have been waiting for the pilgrim, and instead I kept fighting the pilgrim's own people. He had eaten nine holy men at this crossing and never once guessed the tenth was the one he was for. When the monster heard his religious name called, he knew at once it was the bodhisattva's doing. Unafraid now of axe or blade, he parted the waves and put out his head, and saw that it was Mokṣa. He laid down his treasure-staff, and pressing his palms together bowed his head, saying, where is the pilgrim? Mokṣa pointed to the bank — that is he. The monster said, I have offended him these many days and never knew he was my master; how should I do otherwise than follow.

Sanzang received his third disciple on the bank. The ogre knelt, took the tonsure, kept the name Guanyin had given him — Sha Wujing, Sandy for short — and traded the river for the road. But the river still had to be crossed, and that was the gourd's work. At Mokṣa's word, Sandy lifted the nine skulls from his own neck — the heads of the nine who had failed before — and strung them with a cord into a ring, the nine-palace pattern, and set the bodhisattva's red gourd at the center. The whole thing settled onto the weak water and floated, light and steady, a little dharma-boat where no boat could ever swim. Wujing did not delay; he took the nine skulls hung at his neck, strung them with a cord into the nine-palace form, and set the bodhisattva's gourd in the middle. He invited his master to step aboard, and the monk went up onto the gourd-and-skull craft as though onto solid ground.

Sandy steered, the gourd held the heart of it, and the monk rode dry and steady across eight hundred li of water that would have swallowed a feather. On the far bank, the moment the crossing was done, the nine skulls came loose and dissolved — turned to nine threads of cold wind and were gone, the last of the drowned set free now that the man they had waited for had passed over them. And there on the western shore the band stood whole at last. The monk. The monkey. The pig. The river-ogre turned monk. And the white horse that had once been a dragon. Five travelers, all of them remade out of something disgraced, pointed west down the long road that is the rest of the book. Sandy parted the water and steered, and the master crossed the Flowing-Sands River lightly and safe. When they reached the far bank, the nine skulls at once dissolved, scattering into nine streams of dark wind, and vanished without a trace. So the pilgrim crossed the weak water, and the company of them went on together toward the west.