Heat-Dispelling King

Among the three rhinoceros spirits, Cold-Dispelling King is the planner, Dust-Dispelling King is the executor, and Heat-Dispelling King is the one in the middle - the elder brother's helper, the younger brother's partner, and the indispensable backbone of the whole formation. He does not have the chief-planner aura of Cold-Dispelling King, nor the one-man drama of Dust-Dispelling King's nose-piercing ending, but without him the Jinjingfu scam would never have looked like three Buddhas. Two Buddhas in the sky would seem off. Three make the trick believable.

The second brother of the three rhinoceros spirits

Heat-Dispelling King lives in Black-Blue Cave with his brothers. Their names - cold, heat, and dust - match the three powers ascribed to rhinoceros horn in Chinese tradition: drive away cold, drive away heat, drive away dust. The naming is clever, but it also tells us that the three brothers are basically three faces of the same thing: three rhinoceroses, three pairs of horns, three functions. Together they make the complete rhinoceros myth.

In the Jinjingfu scam, Heat-Dispelling King is the middle Buddha. Every Lantern Festival he rides the clouds with the other two, takes on the shape of a Buddha statue, "manifests a miracle," and collects the lamp oil that the people have prepared with such effort. For years the three brothers work in perfect sync and nobody notices.

After Sun Wukong exposes the fake Buddha in chapter 91, the three rhinoceros spirits retreat to Black-Blue Cave. Heat-Dispelling King then fights alongside his brothers against Wukong and the heavenly troops. His martial strength sits in the middle as well - less brute force than Cold-Dispelling King, but not the weakest of the three.

In Journey to the West, though, the middle one is often the easiest to forget. Cold-Dispelling King gets the leadership role. Dust-Dispelling King gets the distinct nose-piercing ending. Heat-Dispelling King is the one wedged between them, without a scene of his own. He exists to complete the three-brother pattern - and Chinese fiction loves threes: three vows, three beatings, three swings of a fan. The rhinoceros spirits are no exception.

Bitten to death by the Four Wood-Bird Stars

In chapter 92, Wukong summons the Four Wood-Bird Stars - Horn Wood Dragon, Dipper Wood Spleen, Hairy Wood Wolf, and Neck Wood Dog - together with Prince Moang, son of the Dragon King, to surround the three rhinoceros spirits. The stars return to their true forms: dragon, qilin-like beast, wolf, and dog, each lunging at the rhinoceros demons.

Heat-Dispelling King is bitten to death in this hunt. The brutality of that phrase matches the directness of the fight. He is not gently subdued by a magic object, nor blown back to his original shape by an immortal breeze. He is bitten to death, like prey under a hunter's jaws. The Four Wood-Bird Stars are a natural enemy to the rhinoceros spirits: wood overcomes earth, and the stars that govern beasts are exactly the right counter to ground-bound animals. This is one of Journey to the West's rare cases of a perfectly calibrated five-phase deployment.

His horns are sawn off together with those of his brothers and some are offered to the Jade Emperor, while the rest are divided among the gods who took part in the battle. In death, his body is completely turned into matter again - a rhinoceros that once played the Buddha above Jinjingfu becomes a set of horns and a corpse.

For the full story of the three rhinoceros spirits - the scam, the hunt, and the politics of the horns - see Cold-Dispelling King.

Related Figures

• Cold-Dispelling King - the eldest brother and chief planner of the Jinjingfu scam
• Dust-Dispelling King - the youngest brother, captured by nose-piercing
• Sun Wukong - the main opponent, who exposes the fake Buddha scam and summons the Four Wood-Bird Stars
• Four Wood-Bird Stars - the heavenly stars that hunt down and kill the three rhinoceros spirits
• Prince Moang - the West Sea Dragon King's son, who leads water troops in the siege