Transformation

The road west dead-ends at eight hundred li of unbroken fire, and the only thing that can put it out is one banana-leaf fan — held by the wife of the Bull Demon King, who happens to be the mother of a boy Wukong got hauled off to serve the Bodhisattva Guanyin. She is not in a lending mood.

Fourteen years and ten thousand miles, and the pilgrims finally stand at the foot of the mountain where the scriptures wait. The last stretch is the strangest — a bottomless boat, a corpse in the river that no one will name, and a heaven whose clerks have their hand out. The road is almost done teaching.

The monkey who could not bear to die crosses two oceans to find a teacher, and finds one who hides the whole secret of immortality inside a riddle and three taps on the skull. What he learns will make him a god — and get him thrown out for showing off.

A rich farmer has a son-in-law problem. The strapping young man who married his daughter three years back has turned out to be a long-snouted, big-eared monster who eats like a famine and has locked the bride away. The farmer wants him gone. The monk and the monkey are happy to oblige.

For once the monk begs his own meal instead of sending a disciple — and walks straight into a house of seven smiling women who are not women at all. By the time the monkey finds the trail, the only thing between his master and the cookpot is a pig with no shame and a monkey with too much pride.

Banished again for killing what his master would not, the Monkey King goes off to nurse the insult — and a second Monkey King walks in, identical down to the last hair, and takes everything. Two Wukongs, same face, same rod, same powers, and no one in heaven, hell, or earth can tell which is real.

A corpse-fiend who wants the holy monk's flesh comes at the pilgrims three times wearing three borrowed faces — a girl, an old woman, an old man. Only one of the travelers can see what is under each disguise, and seeing it is exactly what gets him thrown off the road.

Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly — not a man dreaming of one, but a butterfly completely, happy and free, with no memory of being anyone else. Then he woke. The question that followed has been open ever since: which of them is dreaming now?

Zhuangzi's wife has just died. His old friend Huizi arrives to pay his respects and finds Zhuangzi sitting with his legs stretched wide, drumming on an earthen basin and singing. What follows is less a scene of mourning than a very short lesson in how to think about where everything comes from — and where it goes.

In the northern dark there is a fish so vast no one knows where it ends. One day it becomes a bird, and that bird needs ninety thousand li of open sky just to get airborne. Two small creatures watch it go and find the whole thing baffling — which is exactly the point.