Heaven-Slaying Monkey

Everyone believes that being suppressed beneath Five Elements Mountain for five hundred years was Heaven's punishment for the unruly monkey.

Everyone believes that the journey west of 108,000 li, with a band around his head, was the gods and Buddhas taming the demon ape.

All the beings of the Three Realms have ever seen are shackles and imprisonment,

but no one has ever understood:

He was never trapped by Heaven, nor bound by Buddha.

He was a spirit stone born of primordial chaos, with an innate Daoist body, beyond every law imposed on the world after creation.

With a single thought, he could have shattered Five Elements Mountain, yet he willingly sat beneath it in silence, coldly watching the tides of the world and the chess game of the gods and Buddhas.

He could have broken the golden headband at any moment, yet he willingly wore it on his journey, witnessing humanity's good and evil and the world's vanity for himself.

The five hundred years of silence in the barren mountains were not a helpless imprisonment, but a period of cultivation he had chosen for himself.

The trials and tribulations of the 108,000-li journey were not forced submission and taming, but his own entry into the mortal world to observe and understand it.

When the heavens set up a game, he joined it to watch the show.

When Heaven and Earth imposed shackles, he bore them by choice.

He endured misunderstanding and expulsion, passed through seas of blood, and overcame every inner demon.

He saw through the selfishness of gods and Buddhas, the hypocrisy of merit, and the partiality of the Heavenly Dao.

Only when the game at Spirit Mountain was over, the decrees torn to shreds, and the glamour faded did he raise a hand and free himself from the bonds around his heart that had lasted a thousand years.

The locks imposed by external things are all illusions. Every worldly attachment is chosen by oneself.

All things can be bound, but a spirit stone can never be tamed.

Others start the game. I decide when it ends.

In this life, I will not enter the Buddhist order, submit to Heaven's will, follow its rules, or be controlled by anyone.

There is no longer a pilgrim seeking scriptures in this world,

only a stone, rising above the Nine Heavens, roaming the four seas, free and unrestrained.