Tathagata's light bet and a heavy shackle trapped me, a rebellious stone monkey who dared to compete with the sky, in the dark heart of the mountain. I was trapped for five hundred years.
At the bottom of the dark mountain, only endless loneliness and despair enveloped me. I once cursed the injustice of fate at the mountains, resented the hypocrisy and cunning of heaven, and resented Tathagata's every step of calculation. But day after day, year after year, in the endless silence, the edge in me was eventually worn away by the years.
The sporadic glimmer of light leaking in from the bottom of the mountain, the stubborn weeds growing in the cracks in the rocks, the occasional goshawk with wounded wings, the smell of fireworks and the joys and sorrows of the people below the mountain, a few words of advice from a passing scholar, a few Zen words from a wandering monk, all like rays of warm sunshine, tapping my already frozen heart bit by bit.
In the past five hundred years, I have watched the dynasties of the human world change, witnessed the joys and sorrows of all sentient beings, and slowly transformed from the arrogant and supercilious rebel into a compassionate practitioner. I put aside the resentment in my heart and began to concentrate on cultivating my mind. I used the rocks as a mat and the Dharma as a lamp. I reflected on my past arrogance in loneliness, slowly grew up in the silent redemption, and silently waited for the fate of the pilgrims.
When the sound of Xuanzang's horse hooves penetrated the mountains and forests, the Five Elements Mountain suddenly collapsed, and all the shackles on my body disappeared. I, who had been tempered for five hundred years, put aside all the obsessions in the past, bowed down to Xuanzang's master, and embarked on the journey to the West to learn scriptures. This redemption that was five hundred years late, the legend from unruliness to clarity, from imprisonment to rebirth, contains my most touching persistence and growth in the past five hundred years.
