Sha Wujing

The Flowing-Sand River will not float anything. A goose feather dropped on that water goes down like a coin, and a reed flower sinks the same way. The tablet on the bank gives the measurements in round, impossible numbers, eight hundred across and three thousand down, and under the surface the sand is always moving, which is an odd habit for a river until you learn the place was a desert first and the story filled it with water afterwards.

Nine things floated. They were skulls, and they floated because they had belonged to monks walking west after scriptures, and heaven would not let them go under. The creature in the water had eaten all nine. He noticed that the heads bobbed, thought it curious, threaded them on a rope and wore them under his chin. That is more or less the whole of his commentary on the matter.

The verse the novel gives him is not flattering. Hair loose and standing up like flame. Eyes round and bright as two lamps. A face the colour of indigo, neither black nor green. A voice like an old dragon’s, which is to say thunder, or a drum struck once in a stone room. A cape of pale yellow goose down across the shoulders, two twists of white reed knotted at the waist, and the skulls. In one hand a staff.

Every second or third day he came up. Hunger did it, and the cold of the water, and a merchant or a fisherman went down into the sand while the surface closed over as though someone had thrown a stone. For several hundred years that was his entire employment.

He had not started there. In heaven he held an office with a title that sounds like a joke and was not: Curtain-Lifting General, the officer who stood at the Jade Emperor’s shoulder and raised the screen at court and at the great banquets. At the Festival of Immortal Peaches his grip failed and a crystal cup went to pieces on the floor. Eight hundred strokes of the rod, then exile to the world below. The sentence carried a second clause, and the second clause is the cruel one. Every seventh day a flying sword arrives at the river, passes through his breast and side more than a hundred times, and leaves. He has spent centuries counting the days in between.

Guanyin found him in the middle of that arrangement. She was travelling east to recruit guards for a scripture pilgrimage that had not yet set out, and she made him an offer: protect the monk when he comes, and the sword stops. She shaved his head, gave him the surname Sha, sand, for the water he had been living in, and the religious name Wujing, aware of purity. Then she left him at the river to wait, still hungry, for years.

When the pilgrims finally reached the bank, nobody recognised anybody. Zhu Bajie went into the water after him and the two of them fought there for days, up through the surface and down again, evenly matched and equally sick of it. Sun Wukong, who could do very nearly anything, was useless below the waterline and spent the battle on the shore losing his temper. The deadlock broke only when Guanyin sent her disciple Moksa down with orders. Wujing saw who it was, dropped the staff and knelt. Then came the practical difficulty of the crossing, and he solved it himself: he unstrung the nine skulls, lashed them into a ring around a gourd sent down from heaven, and the raft floated where nothing floats. Tripitaka crossed dry.

The staff is worth a paragraph of its own, because almost everyone has the wrong one in mind. In the novel it is wood and carries no blade at all. A sala tree grows in the moon, Wu Gang cut a limb from it, and Lu Ban the divine carpenter worked the limb into a staff with gold laid inside and countless pearl threads wound outside, and it lengthens and shortens on command exactly as Monkey’s cudgel does. Anyone who has met Sandy in a film, an opera or a video game pictures something else entirely: a monk’s spade with a crescent blade at one end and a shovel at the other. That weapon is real, it sits in Ming military manuals, and it was never his. Late Ming woodblock artists gave staff-carrying literary monks a small crescent finial as a matter of house style, an illustrated Japanese edition of 1806 had swollen the accent into a proper blade, and somewhere in the early twentieth century the confusion finished its work.

Behind the river ogre stands a desert. In the seventh-century biography of the historical Xuanzang, the monk spills his water bag in the sands near Dunhuang, lies down after days without drink, and dreams of a tall spirit with a halberd demanding to know why he is sleeping instead of walking. He wakes, mounts, and the horse finds grass and clean water. Later tellings gave that spirit a name, Shensha shen, the Spirit of the Deep Sands. Japanese Buddhism took him far more seriously than Chinese Buddhism ever did. A monk called Jōgyō, home from a pilgrimage to China in 839, wrote him up and identified him with Vaiśravaṇa, and by the eleventh century he had a rank, General of the Deep Sands, and a settled iconography. One text has him introduce himself with unimprovable directness: his head like a crimson bowl, his two hands like the nets of heaven and earth, seven demon heads hanging at his neck, eight serpents about his limbs. Twelfth-century paintings give him flame hair, elephant knees and the talons of a bird. A fourteenth-century portrait of Xuanzang shows the monk wearing the skull necklace himself.

That necklace is older than both of them. Wrathful deities of esoteric Buddhism wear the mundamala, the garland of severed heads, and the texts are specific about it: Hevajra with his chain of half a hundred, and behind Hevajra the bone ornaments prescribed for adherents of Heruka. The sand demon of a Chinese desert inherited his jewellery from Indian tantra.

He reached fiction well before the great novel. In the thirteenth-century storyteller’s version, the earliest surviving Journey, the demon meets Tripitaka in the Deep Sands and opens with the worst line available to him: he has eaten this monk twice already, in two earlier lives, and the dry bones at his throat are the monk’s own. He builds a golden bridge across the sands only after being threatened with heavenly retribution.

The 1592 book that fixed all of this was published anonymously. Wu Cheng’en’s name was attached to it in the twentieth century on evidence assembled by Hu Shi and Lu Xun, and scholars have argued over the attribution ever since without settling it. The character has no single author. He accumulated, out of a dream in the Gobi, a Japanese guardian cult, an Indian bone garland and four centuries of storytellers.

What he can do follows from where he has been. He is immensely strong and tireless, able to hold a duel for days without slowing. The staff answers his hand and changes size at a thought. Water is his element in the most literal sense, and he is the only one of the three disciples genuinely dangerous below the surface, which is why the river fight goes the way it does. He can take a beating from opponents who would end a mortal outright, which is unsurprising in someone who has survived the sword a hundred times over, once a week, for centuries.

His limits are just as consistent. On land and in the air both his brothers outclass him, and against the higher-ranking monsters of the pilgrimage he is usually the one captured rather than the one doing the rescuing. He carries the luggage. The deeper constraint is not muscular but administrative: he was sentenced by heaven and could be reprieved only by heaven, converted by a bodhisattva and held to terms she set, and every scrap of freedom he gets is granted rather than taken. At the far end of the road the Buddha gives him a rank, Golden-Bodied Arhat. It is a promotion rather than a story, which suits him: of the four travellers he is the one the book gives the fewest lines and the most to carry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sha Wujing in Journey to the West?

Sha Wujing is the third and last disciple of the monk Tripitaka in the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, known in English translations as Friar Sand or Sandy. He was once the Curtain-Lifting General in the Jade Emperor’s court, banished to earth for breaking a crystal cup at the Festival of Immortal Peaches, and lived as a man-eating ogre in the Flowing-Sand River until the bodhisattva Guanyin converted him. He then guarded the pilgrimage all the way to India and back.

Why does Sha Wujing wear a necklace of skulls?

The skulls belonged to nine monks who had tried to cross the Flowing-Sand River on scripture pilgrimages of their own, and Sha Wujing ate all nine. Nothing floats in that river, not even a goose feather, but the nine skulls refused to sink, so he strung them on a rope and wore them. When Tripitaka needed to cross, those same skulls were lashed around a heaven-sent gourd to make a raft that would carry him over.

What weapon does Sha Wujing use?

In the novel he carries a wooden treasure staff with no blade on it, cut from a sala tree growing in the moon by Wu Gang and shaped by the divine carpenter Lu Ban, with gold inside and pearl threads wound outside. Like the Monkey King’s cudgel, it grows and shrinks at his command. The crescent-bladed monk’s spade he carries in films, operas and games is a much later substitution that took hold no earlier than the twentieth century.

Where did the character of Sha Wujing come from?

He descends from Shensha shen, the Spirit of the Deep Sands, a desert spirit who appears in a seventh-century biography of the pilgrim Xuanzang as a halberd-carrying figure in a fevered dream near Dunhuang. Japanese Buddhism venerated him as General of the Deep Sands from about the ninth century, giving him flame hair, a skull necklace and serpents around his limbs. A thirteenth-century storytellers’ Journey turned him into a sand demon who had eaten Tripitaka in earlier lives, and the 1592 novel moved him from a desert into a river.

What happens to Sha Wujing at the end of the journey?

At the end of the pilgrimage the Buddha rewards each of the travellers, and Sha Wujing is made the Golden-Bodied Arhat. It is a rank in the Buddhist hierarchy rather than a transformation, and it ends the punishment that began when he was thrown out of heaven. Of the four pilgrims he receives the least narrative attention and the plainest reward.

Related Entries

Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Guan Yin, Avalokiteśvara, Xiwangmu, Chang’e, Laozi, Eight Immortals, Yanluo, Buddha, Bodhisattvas, Yaksha, Preta