Beneath Five Elements Mountain, he pins down the Monkey King. “Protect me on my pilgrimage? No. I’m taking you to storm Mount Ling and ask the Tathagata why he kept you under that mountain for five hundred years!”
From then on, the journey west takes a very different turn.
He subdues Buddhas with his fists and tramples demons underfoot. The so-called eighty-one trials all become fuel for his cultivation.
With Mount Ling just ahead and ten thousand Buddhas arrayed before him, he turns to his three well-behaved disciples and smiles faintly:
“Disciples, follow your master... and bury all the gods and Buddhas in the heavens.”
