The Journey to the West, Revised Edition, Volume 2 (83 page)

5
. Eight Rules is punning here on the word
qing
, a sonorous stone used for religious rituals. Another phoneme,
qing
, means festivity or celebration.

6
. According to the “Classic of West Mountain
” in the
Classic of Mountain and Sea
, the “jade cream
” comes bubbling and gushing out of a river flowing from a certain Mount Mi
. The mythic Yellow Emperor drank it himself and used it for sacrifices. See
Shanhaijing jiaozhu
, ed. and annotated Yuan Ke
(Shanghai, 1980), p. 41; Rémi Mathieu,
Étude sur la mythologie et l’ethnologie de la Chine ancienne, Traduction annotée du
Shanhai jing (2 vols. Paris: Collège de France, 1983), 1: 80–81.

7
. Treading the Dipper: the XYJ text here literally reads, “he wore a silk head wrap spread with the dipper stars
,” but the word “spread,
bu
,” is homophonous with
bu
(to walk, tread, or pace), and I have read the line according to this sense of the word. The movements implied are all actions crucial to certain Daoist rituals of walking or dancing to cosmic patterns, including those of the constellations and planets. See the entry on “Bugang
or
,” in ET 1: 237–38.

8
. Dongfang Shuo
: reputed to be a favorite court-jester in the reign of Han Wudi (r. 141–87). Even in his lifetime, Dongfang was nicknamed “zhexian, or banished immortal.” He suffered this fate because, like the Monkey in our present novel, he stole peaches from the Lady Queen Mother of the West. Accounts of his exploits could be found in both canonical history (i.e., the
Records of the Historian
,
j
126, and
Hanshu
,
j
65) and other anecdotal or noncanonical writings. In late centuries, a series of stage works further dramatized his story. See the entry under his name in ET 1: 366–67.