Ruyi Jingu Bang

Also Known As: 如意金箍棒, “As-You-Wish Gold-Banded Staff”, also rendered “Compliant Golden-Hooped Rod”; called the Rod of Numinous Yang in the novel’s verse
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: It changes size at its owner’s spoken word, from an embroidery needle small enough to tuck behind an ear to a shaft whose top reaches the thirty-third heaven and whose base rests in the eighteenth layer of hell.
Role in Mythos: It is the weapon Sun Wukong takes from the treasury of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea and carries for the whole of the pilgrimage west to fetch the Buddhist scriptures.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people cannot lift it, and the novel makes a joke of the fact; two bandit chiefs who try to pull it out of the ground in chapter fifty-six are compared to dragonflies attempting to shake a stone pillar. Its stated weight of thirteen thousand five hundred catties is the whole point of it, a threshold that sorts the divine from the merely strong.

A thousand shafts of golden light were coming up out of the dark of the sea treasury, and the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea pointed at them and said, more or less, that one, the thing that is glowing. He had already admitted he could not move it. Neither could anyone in his household. His wife had noticed the iron putting out a strange and lovely light for several days and had suggested, quietly, that the pillar might be waiting for someone.

Sun Wukong hitched up his clothes and put a hand on it. Cold iron, wider than his reach, over twenty feet of it standing in the treasury floor like a mooring post for the whole ocean. He heaved it up with both hands and complained that it was too long and too thick to be any use, and the iron shortened and narrowed while he was still speaking. He bounced it and asked for smaller. It obliged again. Carrying it out to the light he found a golden hoop at each end and solid black iron between them, and beside one hoop a line of characters cut into the metal: the As-You-Wish Gold-Banded Staff, weight thirteen thousand five hundred catties. In Ming measure that is close to eight tonnes.

Before it was a weapon it was an instrument. The Dragon King explains that this was the measure with which Yu the Great fixed the depths of the rivers and oceans when he conquered the flood, and much later, in chapter eighty-eight, Monkey recites a poem that says the same: an iron rod forged at creation’s dawn by Great Yu himself, which fathomed every ocean, river and lake, and then stayed in the East Ocean and ruled the seas. A rod that had held the sea still for centuries. In chapter seventy-five he boasts instead that Laozi forged it in his own stove, nine times refined, and the two accounts cannot both be true. The stories disagree, and neither version bothers to notice the other.

The object itself is not old. It arrives with the 1592 novel, published anonymously and long attributed to Wu Cheng’en, and the shape it took there was assembled out of two much older things. The Song-dynasty ancestor of the story, the *Da Tang Sanzang qujing shihua*, gives the monkey a different weapon: Vaisravana hands him a cap of invisibility, an alms bowl, and a golden-ringed monk’s staff, and there is a separate iron cudgel he borrows, one the Queen Mother of the West had once used to flog him for stealing peaches. Meir Shahar has traced the ringed staff to real practice rather than to legend. It was the *xizhang*, one of the eighteen items Indian monastic law required a monk to carry, hung with six to twelve metal rings that clashed as he walked, warning snakes off the path ahead and letting householders know a beggar was coming. Martial monks carried plainer wooden and iron staves for less pious reasons. Somewhere between the Song telling and the Ming one, the two merged, and the rings of a mendicant’s noisy walking staff ended up as gold bands on a killing weight of iron.

What it does follows from what it is. Because it was a measuring rod, it answers to instruction: he calls smaller, smaller, smaller and it becomes a needle he keeps inside his ear, then bigger and it is a barrel again, and on the stone bridge outside his cave he grows himself to a hundred thousand feet with a head like Mount Tai and lets the rod climb until it props heaven off hell for the entertainment of several thousand monkeys. Because it once held back water, it multiplies like water; fighting Nezha he sprouts three heads and six arms and shakes the rod into three, and against a demon army in chapter fifty he simply throws it into the air and lets iron rods come down in their hundreds and thousands like flying snakes. It picks locks, springing every bolt in a locked estate with a pop. It becomes a razor when he needs to shave a Daoist boy’s head, and a steel drill when he needs to bore out through a dragon’s horn. Asleep, dragged to the Region of Darkness by two summoners with a warrant, he pulls the treasure out of his ear anyway, thickens it to the width of a rice bowl, reduces both escorts to hash, borrows a brush from the terrified judges and crosses every monkey name out of the ledgers of the dead. Then he trips on a clump of grass and wakes up.

The limits are stranger than the powers. A rod that fixed the depth of every sea gives him no advantage whatsoever in water; he admits at the Flowing-Sands River that he has to make a sign and recite a spell before he can even walk down there, and that fighting underwater cramps his style. It can be taken from him, which happens twice: a rhinoceros demon sucks it away with a steel bracelet, and a lion spirit lifts the weapons of all three pilgrims with a wind, and both times he has to get it back by trickery rather than by force. And it is only ever as strong as the arm. Standing in the dirt where he planted it, with two robbers hauling at it and going nowhere, it is not a magic wand at all. It is eight tonnes of iron that nobody else on the road can pick up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ruyi Jingu Bang?

The Ruyi Jingu Bang is the iron staff carried by Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, in the Chinese novel *Journey to the West*. Its name means roughly “As-You-Wish Gold-Banded Staff”. It is a shaft of black iron with a golden hoop at each end, and it changes size on command.

How heavy is the Monkey King’s staff?

The inscription on the staff gives its weight as thirteen thousand five hundred catties, which in Ming-dynasty measure works out at close to eight tonnes, or roughly 17,550 pounds. The novel treats that weight as a test of who is allowed to hold it, and in chapter fifty-six two bandits cannot shift it even slightly.

Where did the Ruyi Jingu Bang come from?

Sun Wukong takes it from the treasury of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, who says it was the measure Yu the Great used to fix the depths of the rivers and oceans during the great flood. The novel contradicts itself later, when Monkey claims instead that Laozi forged it in his furnace. Both accounts appear in the same book.

What can the staff actually do?

It shrinks to the size of a needle that Sun Wukong keeps behind his ear and grows tall enough to reach the thirty-third heaven. It also multiplies into hundreds or thousands of copies, opens locks, and transforms into other tools such as a razor or a drill. It gives him no help underwater, and it can be stolen.

Is the staff an ancient Chinese myth or a literary invention?

It belongs to literature. The staff in its familiar form appears in the 1592 novel, though its parts are older: the Song-dynasty version of the story gives the monkey a golden-ringed Buddhist monk’s staff and a separate borrowed iron cudgel. Meir Shahar has argued that the golden rings come from the *xizhang*, the ringed staff that Buddhist monks genuinely carried on the road.