A hundred thousand Heavenly Soldiers can't catch Sun Wukong, so Heaven calls in its greatest hunter: Erlang Shen. Sparrow? He becomes a hawk. Fish? He becomes the bird that eats fish. Whatever Wukong turns into, Erlang sees through it. Then, at the end of the shape-shifting duel, a blow nobody saw coming drops from Heaven's Gate.
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The myth behind this episode
Journey to the West is one of the great classic novels of China. Its oldest complete surviving edition was printed by the Shidetang publishing house in 1592, during the Ming dynasty. The author is traditionally said to be Wu Cheng'en, but scholars still debate this. The first seven chapters tell how Sun Wukong, a stone-born monkey king, takes on the whole of Heaven. This happens long before he joins the monk on the famous pilgrimage.
By Chapter 6, Wukong has wrecked the Peach Banquet, a grand feast of immortality peaches held in Heaven, and gone home to his stronghold, the Water Curtain Cave on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit. Heaven's commander, Heavenly King Li (Li Jing, the pagoda-bearing general), surrounds the mountain with a hundred thousand soldiers. Even so, they cannot take him.
Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, arrives for the banquet and finds the hall empty. When she learns why, she sends her disciple Hui'an (also called Muzha) to see how the fighting is going. He trades blows with Wukong for fifty or sixty rounds, until his arms go numb and he retreats. Guanyin then recommends the Jade Emperor's nephew, Erlang Shen, the 'Illustrious Sage' worshipped at a temple in Guanjiangkou. Erlang lives on earth and keeps his independence. The novel says he will answer a call to send troops, but not a summons to court. So the Jade Emperor sends him a request for troops.
Erlang brings his six sworn brothers from Plum Mountain, about twelve hundred lesser spirits, a hawk and a hound. He asks Heavenly King Li to stay in the sky holding a demon-revealing mirror and to point it at Wukong if he runs. The two champions fight more than three hundred rounds with no winner. Both grow to enormous size. While they stand facing each other, Erlang's brothers storm the Water Curtain Cave and scatter the monkeys. Seeing his army collapse, Wukong panics and flees.
What follows is the famous transformation chase. Wukong becomes a sparrow, and Erlang becomes a hawk. Wukong becomes a large water bird, and Erlang a sea crane. Wukong dives into a stream as a fish, and Erlang waits above as a fish hawk. He spots Wukong because this fish looks like no real species. Wukong becomes a water snake, and Erlang a red-crowned grey crane. Then Wukong turns into a bustard, a bird the novel calls low and shameless. Erlang refuses to take a matching form. He returns to his own shape and fires his slingshot instead.
Wukong next disguises himself as a small roadside temple. His mouth becomes the door and his teeth the door panels. His tongue becomes the statue inside and his eyes the windows. His tail has nowhere to go, so it sticks up behind the building as a flagpole, and Erlang knows no real temple puts its flagpole at the back. Wukong escapes again. This time he takes Erlang's own form and walks into Erlang's temple, where the servants bow to him. When the real Erlang arrives, Wukong jokes that the temple now belongs to the Sun family.
The battle returns to the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit. Watching from Heaven's South Gate, Laozi (Taishang Laojun, the deified founder of Taoism) stops Guanyin from throwing her porcelain vase, which might break. He drops his Diamond Snare instead, an indestructible steel ring. It strikes Wukong on the head. Erlang's hound bites his calf, and the seven brothers pin him down. They pierce the bones near his shoulders so he can no longer transform. The Jade Emperor orders him taken to the execution platform, and the chapter ends there.
The chapter title sets the 'Little Sage' against the 'Great Sage,' and the contrast drives the story. Wukong is clever and powerful, but he is also cocky. His one weakness, a tail that no disguise can hide, shows the chase's main idea. Erlang wins because he understands each form better than Wukong does, not because he is stronger. Each disguise is answered by its natural predator, which turns the duel into a game of knowledge about the natural world.
Erlang himself comes out of real Chinese religious practice. He was a popular local god, and his temples drew worshippers seeking help. The chapter shows this in a sly way through the prayer requests Wukong reads while posing as the god. Historians have linked Erlang's origins to several figures, including a son of the engineer Li Bing. The novel instead gives him the surname Yang and makes him the Jade Emperor's nephew, and other theories exist. The ending is also pointed. Heaven's great army fails, and victory comes from an outsider god, a dog, and a Taoist trick thrown from the sidelines.
The manga follows the original order of events closely. The exact sequence of disguises is kept: sparrow and hawk, water bird and sea crane, fish and fish hawk, snake and crane, then the bustard and the slingshot. So are the temple disguise, Laozi's snare and the hound's bite.
The artists added the following. The novel names the six Plum Mountain brothers but gives them almost no personality, so the manga invents their faces, temperaments and weapons. It also designs the look of the spirit soldiers, Erlang's temple and its staff, and the hound's breed and build. The panel layouts and mid-transformation drawings are new, along with extra dialogue and inner thoughts, the gods' reactions at the South Gate, and the size and flight of the Diamond Snare. Any scenes showing what happens to the captured monkeys are also new. The original says little beyond the fact that many were taken.
If you want to see the shape-shifting duel play out panel by panel, Episode 6 of Journey to the West: The Great Sage Equal to Heaven is right here on Manga Portal. Like every episode in the series, it is free to read with no sign-up. Start from Episode 1 to follow Wukong's rise, or read on to find out whether Heaven can actually execute him.
In Chapter 6, Erlang Shen and his six sworn brothers capture Wukong. The decisive blow comes from Laozi, who drops his Diamond Snare on Wukong's head, and then Erlang's hound bites Wukong's leg.
Erlang Shen is a Chinese god who was worshipped at temples as a popular local deity. In Journey to the West he is the Jade Emperor's nephew and a skilled hunter with a hawk and a hound. He is the one rival who can match Wukong's transformations.
Wukong became a sparrow, a large water bird, a fish, a water snake, a bustard, a small temple, and finally Erlang himself. Erlang answered each animal with its predator: a hawk, a sea crane, a fish hawk and a crane. Against the bustard he simply used his slingshot.
Wukong could not hide his tail, so he made it into a flagpole standing behind the temple. Erlang knew real temples never place their flagpole at the back, so he realized the building was Wukong.
At the end of Chapter 6, the Jade Emperor orders him taken to the execution platform. Whether Heaven can actually carry out the sentence is the subject of the next chapter.