Six-Eared Macaque

If even Diting will not speak the truth, how can the answer to the True and False Monkey King be trusted?

That question has haunted readers for more than four hundred years. In chapter 58, Diting lies on the ground for a long while, listens carefully, and then tells Yama in plain terms: "I have heard the demon's true identity, but I cannot say it." It is not that he cannot hear. It is that he dares not speak. A divine beast that can hear "eight hundred when seated and three thousand when lying down" identifies the truth and then closes its mouth, sending the two identical monkeys to Buddha Rulai for judgment. Buddha's ruling is blunt: this is the Six-Eared Macaque, one of the four chaos monkeys, who "understands every sound, perceives every principle, knows all before and after, and sees all things clearly." The golden bowl comes down, Sun Wukong swings his staff, and the demon is dead. The case is closed - or is it? Did we actually learn the truth, or did we merely receive an answer stamped by the highest authority? What keeps the True and False Monkey King alive in the reader's mind is not the answer itself, but the fact that the answer never quite feels final.

The chapter 56 setup: why Wukong kills the robbers

Everything begins with a killing in chapter 56.

The pilgrimage party reaches a barren mountain and runs into a band of thieves blocking the road. The novel is direct about them: they are ordinary robbers, with no demonic aura and no magic, just common "road bandits." Tripitaka is tied to a tree. Sun Wukong arrives and quickly scatters the thieves with a few blows. The matter could have ended there. But Wukong does not stop. He chases down the bandit leader who is trying to escape and kills him with one staff stroke.

Not a demon. Not a ghost. A living man.

There is a precedent for this earlier in the book. In chapter 14 Wukong kills six robbers whose names - Eye-Seeing Joy, Ear-Hearing Rage, Nose-Smelling Love, Tongue-Tasting Thought, Mind-Seeing Desire, and Body-Itself Worry - are obviously allegorical. Tripitaka rebukes him there too, but the Buddhist symbolism gives the scene a different weight. Chapter 56 is not that. These thieves have no allegorical names. They are just men robbing the road. Wukong kills one of them and even brings the head back to Tripitaka. Tripitaka is shaken, chants a funeral spell for the dead, and tells Wukong that he can no longer keep a disciple who kills so lightly.

Wukong's answer is worth reading closely. He does not apologize or soften. He bristles and says that if Tripitaka will not have him, he can go back to Flower-Fruit Mountain. The hidden meaning is simple: if you do not want me, I still have a home of my own. That line enrages Tripitaka, who begins to recite the headband spell. Wukong rolls on the ground in pain and flies away in fury.

This is the true opening of the True and False Monkey King story. Wu Cheng'en uses one whole chapter to lay out the core split: the "monkey nature" inside Wukong, which is swift, violent, and unconstrained, versus the "monk nature" demanded by the pilgrimage, which is merciful and bound by restraint. The split has been building for many chapters, but chapter 56 is the first full rupture. The break is not about a demon. It is about the ethics of what may be killed.

Wukong flies off to Guanyin to complain. Not long after he leaves, a monkey exactly like him appears before Tripitaka.

The four chaos monkeys: creatures outside the tenfold order

In chapter 58, Buddha tells the assembly at the Thunderclap Monastery something crucial:

"Within the universe there are five kinds of immortals: heaven, earth, spirit, human, and ghost. There are also five kinds of creatures: shell, scaled, furred, feathered, and insect. And then there are four chaos monkeys, who do not belong to the ten categories."

That sentence is the key to Six-Eared Macaque's identity. All living things can be sorted into the five immortals and five creatures, ten categories in all. Gods have registers, demons have households, even ghosts have names in Yama's ledger. But the four chaos monkeys stand outside that system. They are categories' blind spot.

The four are: the Stone Monkey of Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze, who can transform and understand heaven and earth - Wukong; the Red-Buttocked Horse Monkey, who knows yin and yang and the ways of men; the Gibbon, who can seize the sun and moon and weigh good and ill; and the Six-Eared Macaque, who "understands every sound, perceives every principle, knows all before and after, and sees all things clearly." They all possess marvels, but their common trait is that they are not counted among the ten categories. Every ordinary method of identification built on that system fails against them.

That explains a puzzle that has bothered readers forever. Why does the demon-revealing mirror fail? Because the Macaque is not in the category the mirror is built to judge. Why does the Book of Life and Death fail? Because he has no place in the registry. Why does the headband hurt both monkeys? Because the Macaque can perfectly copy even the vibration of the curse. He is not wearing a second headband. He is echoing the pain pattern itself.

"Outside the ten categories" is a severe idea in Buddhist and Daoist cosmology. It means more than rare. It means unfiled. No origin, no allegiance, no record. A system that assumes everything can be named meets one thing that cannot be named.

Why did Wu Cheng'en invent such a being? Because he needed an opponent that could defeat every ordinary method of truth-finding. If a mirror could reveal him at once, the story would collapse in two pages. Only when Guanyin fails, Yama fails, and Diting fails - and only Buddha remains - does the story reach the question it really wants to ask: in a world where every usual test has broken down, who gets to decide what is true?

Perfect copying: from the staff to the headband

The Six-Eared Macaque copies Wukong with unsettling perfection.

The face is identical - "dressed exactly alike, with the same features" - down to the fur, the tiger-skin skirt, and the cloud-walking boots. The voice is identical. The two monkeys curse each other in front of Guanyin, and even she cannot tell them apart. The martial skill is identical. They fight hundreds of rounds without result, from earth to heaven, from heaven to underworld, from underworld to the Buddhist realm, and neither can prevail.

The equipment is copied too. The Golden-Banded Staff is a one-of-a-kind divine weapon from the Dragon Palace, but the Macaque's "Staff of Whatever-You-Wish" is exactly the same in size, changeability, and force. The novel never explains where it came from. It cannot be another Staff of Compliant Gold; there is only one. It cannot have been stolen from heaven's armory, because a theft of that scale would have shaken the court. The simplest reading is that the Macaque's ability to "understand every sound and principle" includes a deep level of imitation: he hears the essence of the weapon and reproduces it in material form.

The most astonishing copy is the headband. Guanyin gave that band to Wukong herself. Tripitaka controls the spell. Their binding is supposed to be unique. Yet the Macaque has one too, identical in every way. When Tripitaka chants the spell, both monkeys cry out in pain. Even Guanyin is stunned. She made the band, designed the binding, and now finds herself unable to tell original from copy.

That perfect copying raises a harder question. If two beings are identical in every observable way, where exactly does "original" end and "copy" begin? They differ in no visible form, no skill, no bodily shape, and not even in the spell's effect. The only difference left is who came first - but even that becomes unstable once the Macaque's power to know all past things enters the picture. He knows Wukong's whole history and can repeat it flawlessly. The two monkeys stand side by side, each giving his own account, each detail lining up, and no ordinary test can split them apart.

Here Wu Cheng'en steps into a philosophical deep end: the most extreme version of the Ship of Theseus problem. If a copy matches the original in every property, is it still false? And if truth does not depend on observable property, what does it depend on?

Guanyin cannot tell, Yama cannot find, Diting will not speak

The process of identification is staged as a three-step ladder of failure, and each failure is stranger than the last.

First comes Guanyin. The two monkeys fight their way to Mount Potalaka and stand before her, each claiming to be the real one. Guanyin is the inventor of the headband, Wukong's most important patron, and the second-greatest source of wisdom in the novel after Buddha. She tries the spell she knows best. Both monkeys roll on the ground. She admits at once, "I cannot tell them apart." That is a severe failure. It means the maker cannot tell her own product from the counterfeit.

She then sends Muzha to the Jade Emperor's court and asks for the demon-revealing mirror. The mirror shows the same body, the same staff, the same face - only two pairs of ears. It can confirm that there are two monkeys, but it cannot say which is which.

Second comes Yama's underworld. The pair fight down into the netherworld. Yama checks the Book of Life and Death and finds nothing. The Macaque is outside the ten categories, so there is no entry for him at all.

Then Diting appears. This beast, lying beside Kṣitigarbha, is said to have the sharpest hearing in the cosmos. He lies down, listens carefully, and whispers to Yama that the demon's true name can be made out, but it cannot be said aloud. Why? Because if the truth is spoken there, the Macaque may rage through the underworld, and the underworld has no power to stop him. Better to send them to the Buddha, who can judge it.

That silence is the darkest point. Diting knows the truth and chooses not to speak it. He hands judgment upward. Morally, that is ambivalent. He could have shouted the answer and ended the matter. Instead he chooses safety over revelation. His silence shows a brutal fact of power: truth is only as strong as the authority able to bear the cost of speaking it. Diting cannot bear that cost, so the truth stays sealed in the underworld until it reaches a judge strong enough to hold it.

Guanyin fails because she lacks the power to separate them. Yama fails because the system has no file for the Macaque. Diting succeeds in hearing the truth, but refuses to release it. The ladder of failure is brilliant because it does not simply repeat "they cannot tell." It shows three kinds of helplessness: inability, system failure, and fear.

Buddha's judgment: the final ruling under the golden bowl

The two monkeys fight all the way to Thunderclap Monastery. There, before the Great Hall, Buddha explains the Four Chaos Monkeys and then points at the false one.

"I see that the false Wukong is the Six-Eared Macaque."

The words are barely spoken before the Macaque panics. He turns into a bee and tries to flee. Buddha flips his hand, covers him with the golden bowl, and when the bowl is lifted, the creature inside has reverted to its true form. Wukong then raises his staff and kills him.

The trial is astonishingly brief. After all the pages of failure, Buddha's sentence falls in almost one breath. But how did he know? The novel never gives a technical explanation. He does not use a mirror, a spell, a register, or Diting. He merely "observes" and declares. In Buddhist language, this is the Buddha eye seeing the forms of all things. For the reader, it is simply the logic of supreme authority: he knows because he is Buddha.

The Macaque's reaction matters too. This is the first and only moment when he looks different from Wukong. Until that point he has been calm, defiant, and perfectly even under pressure. The instant Buddha names him, he breaks. There are two ways to read that. One is that Buddha really does see beyond disguise, and the Macaque knows he has been found out. The other is more chilling: Buddha's authority itself creates the verdict. Whoever he names as false is false.

His attempt to escape as a bee is revealing. He has spent the whole story claiming to be the real one. If he truly understands all sounds and principles, he should know Buddha can see through him. Why, then, go to the monastery at all? Did he misjudge? Or did he never have a choice - did the fight between the two monkeys lead only to a place where the dispute could finally be ended, with or without his consent?

Once the golden bowl drops, Wukong kills him at once. Buddha does not stop the blow. That treatment differs from other demons. Some are taken back by their owners. Some are pressed into service. Some are spared. The Six-Eared Macaque gets none of that. He is not redeemed, reclaimed, or converted. Buddha says only "Well done, well done" - a monk's phrase spoken at the moment a life is extinguished with one strike, cool as iron.

Killed in one stroke: the novel's cleanest demon ending

The Six-Eared Macaque is one of the neatest demon endings in the novel. He is not taken away as a mount, not transformed back and released, not locked into a cave or treasure vessel for later use. He is just killed. One blow and done.

That ending is striking because of how final it is. Most demons in Journey to the West do not die. Bull Demon King is subdued by nose-piercing and sent to Buddha's realm. Red Boy is taken in by Guanyin and made into a boy attendant. Yellow Wind Demon is subdued with the Wind-Subduing Pill. White Bone Demon is killed after several stages, but only because she has no larger backing and can be fully destroyed. Most demons with a known origin are "returned to their owner." A stolen mount is returned to the person who lost it. A runaway attendant goes back to the temple. A demon with no origin may be slain, but even then there is often a ritual.

The Macaque has none of that. He is one of the Four Chaos Monkeys. He has no master, no origin story that the court can claim, and nobody comes to collect him. Buddha says he is outside the ten categories, and the other side of that statement is simple: no god or Buddha is responsible for his existence, and no one in the system is obliged to defend him. He is fully off the books. So his death requires no paperwork. No filing, no hearing, no clean-up. One staff strike, and the matter is over.

After Wukong kills him, Buddha says "well done" and sends Guanyin to return Wukong to the road. There is no inquiry into where the Macaque came from, no investigation into how he learned Wukong's skill, no reflection on why heaven and hell could not detect him. A being that fooled the mirror, the underworld register, and the headband was struck dead, and everyone went home relieved. That refusal to pursue the matter is itself a position: kill him and move on. Do not ask what he was.

The "two minds" reading: Wu Cheng'en's Zen metaphor

The chapter 58 title is "Two Minds Stir Up the Great Cosmos; One Body Finds It Hard to Cultivate True Stillness." Those fourteen characters are the philosophical skeleton of the whole arc.

"Two minds" is a central Zen idea. The aim of cultivation is to have one mind only, not two. Once a second thought arises, that is duality, and from duality come delusion, attachment, and trouble. What is Wukong's second mind? It is the part of him that wants to break free, go back to Flower-Fruit Mountain, and rule as king. In chapter 56, after killing the robbers, he tells Tripitaka, "If you do not want me, I will return to Flower-Fruit Mountain." That sentence is the outward form of his second mind. He says he wants to journey to the West, but somewhere inside he keeps the exit open.

Wu Cheng'en turns that inner split into a body - the Six-Eared Macaque. The Macaque is not an outside invader. He is Wukong's projected shadow. The acts he performs - beating Tripitaka, stealing the luggage, setting up a fake pilgrimage band on Flower-Fruit Mountain - are exactly the acts Wukong secretly wants to do in his most rebellious moods. When Tripitaka drove him away in chapter 56, the thought may have flashed through Wukong's mind: why not strike the monk, take the luggage, and return home as king? He never acted on it, but the idea congealed into the Macaque.

Buddha's explanation after the reveal supports that reading. He does not treat the Macaque as a separate invader. He treats the whole episode as a problem in Wukong's own cultivation. The mind must be purified, or it will generate this kind of demon. Only one mind can reach true stillness. In other words, the Macaque is not the enemy Wukong needs to kill. He is the self Wukong needs to overcome.

From that angle, Wukong's final blow means something else entirely. He is not killing a demon. He is killing the part of himself that cannot settle. After chapter 58, his character changes. He becomes more compliant, less ready to argue, less likely to strike first. The bright, unruly Great Sage gradually gives way to a more disciplined pilgrim. From the point of view of cultivation, that is success. From the point of view of character, it feels like loss: something sharp and living has been ground down.

"One body finds it hard to cultivate true stillness" - one body, because Wukong and the Macaque are one at the root. The two monkeys are not two separate beings. They are two faces of one being. Killing the Macaque means killing half of oneself. The price of cultivation is to become incomplete.

That may be the deepest tragedy of the True and False Monkey King story: whichever one dies, the survivor is no longer whole.

The four-hundred-year case: which one was killed?

Back to the question at the start. If even Diting would not say the truth, must Buddha's answer be correct?

A popular folk reading says the one killed was the real Wukong, and the one who lived was the Six-Eared Macaque. The usual arguments go like this. First, the Macaque knows all before and after - why would he go to Thunderclap Monastery if he knew it meant death, unless the real Wukong believed Buddha would vindicate him? Second, Wukong becomes much more obedient after chapter 58, no longer carrying the wild rebelliousness of the Great Sage who had once been pressed under a mountain for five hundred years. Third, Buddha needs a compliant pilgrim, and the Macaque would be easier to use than a stubborn real monkey.

That reading is hard to sustain from the text itself, because the novel explicitly gives Buddha's verdict and shows the Macaque reveal his form under the bowl. Yet it refuses to die because it touches a genuine nerve in the story: we cannot verify Buddha's ruling. No third party independently confirms the judgment. Diting heard the truth but would not speak. Buddha announced the truth but did not explain it. In legal terms, this is an unappealable final verdict. You may believe it, but you cannot prove it.

That unverifiable authority is exactly Wu Cheng'en's cleverest move. He leaves the reader in a permanent state of half-belief. If you trust Buddha, the case is closed. If you do not, the truth has been buried by power. Four hundred years of argument prove the story worked: it created a case that can never fully be closed.

The Six-Eared Macaque is also the novel's most extreme interrogation of identity. In a cosmos where everything is classed, he is the one being outside classification. In a story where everyone has a role, he is the one impersonator. In a moral system that divides good from evil cleanly, his evil or goodness depends entirely on who Buddha says he is. After he is killed, no one prays over him, and no one remembers his name. The only evidence he ever existed is that Wukong became a little more obedient afterward.

Related figures

• Sun Wukong - the one he impersonates, and the Stone Monkey of Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze among the Four Chaos Monkeys. Their final duel runs through chapters 56 to 58, and ends when Wukong kills the Macaque with one blow. In Buddhist symbolism, the Macaque is often read as Wukong's second mind made flesh.
• Tripitaka - the direct victim of the True and False Monkey King incident. Wukong's killing of the robber in chapter 56 drives him away, and the false monkey later injures him and steals the luggage and credentials.
• Guanyin - the first failure in the chain of identification. As the inventor of the headband, she chants the spell and finds both monkeys in pain, then admits she cannot tell them apart and sends them to Buddha.
• Diting - the beast of Kṣitigarbha with hearing that can "sit and hear eight hundred, lie and hear three thousand." He listens, identifies the truth, and refuses to say it out loud for fear that the Macaque will rampage through the underworld.
• Yama - the second failed judge. He checks the Book of Life and Death and finds no entry for the Macaque, because the creature is outside the ten categories.
• Buddha Rulai - the final judge. He reveals the Four Chaos Monkeys, covers the Macaque with the golden bowl, and is the only figure who can both identify and subdue him.
• Zhu Bajie - the monkey king's fake-brother accomplice in the false pilgrimage band. His return from Flower-Fruit Mountain helps trigger the unmasking.
• Sha Wujing - the first member of the party to notice the oddity and go investigate the false pilgrimage band on Flower-Fruit Mountain.