Speaking of The Great Saint Sun Wukong of Qitian, in China, it can be said that everyone knows everyone. When Brother Monkey appeared on the big screen wearing a purple and gold crown and wearing a golden armor to order the demons, I believe that many people could not help but get excited, and even silently read in their hearts: "Oh! Right! This is what a Great Sage of Qi Tian looks like! Only the name 'Qi Tian Dasheng' is worthy of our monkey brother! ”
Sun Wukong on the opera stage
In fact, Brother Monkey has many names in "Journey to the West", such as Bow Ma Wen, Qi Tian Dasheng, Sun Xinger, Monkey King, Jin Gong, Fighting Buddha, and so on. However, only the name of "Qi Tian Dasheng" is the most powerful and domineering, and the most thunderous. But if I said that the name "Qi Tian Dasheng" was not Sun Wukong's at the beginning, but wu Cheng'en borrowed it from somewhere else, would you want to beat me?
Don't rush to hit me, listen to me talk about something, and then you decide whether to hit me or not.
Because the long novel "Journey to the West" is not the product of Wu Cheng'en's creation alone, it is a cumulative work of generations. What is a cumulative work for generations? That is, the story here is not formed at once, but has become more and more perfect after the continuous "addition of branches and leaves" by generations of literati. To put it simply, Wu Cheng'en was actually the last editor, he put together all the stories about the journey to the west that had been circulated before, and then reprocessed and polished it himself, and finally formed the way we see it now.
In the early Journey to the West story, Sun Wukong and Qi Tian Dasheng are not monkeys. It was not until the miscellaneous drama "Journey to the West" by a writer named Yang Jingxian at the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty that the bridge section of "Qi Tian Dasheng" appeared, but the "Qi Tian Dasheng" here is not Sun Wukong, but his eldest brother; and he himself calls himself "Tongtian Dasheng".
In the third book of the script, Sun Wukong introduces himself and says:
"There are five little saint brothers and sisters: the eldest sister Lishan old mother, the second sister Wuzhi Virgin, the eldest brother Qi Tian Dasheng, the little saint Tongtian Great Sage, and the third brother playing sanlang. Climb the vines and collect the gesta when you are angry, and stir up the sea and turn the river when you are angry. ...... I stole a hundred peaches from the Queen Mother, a set of fairy clothes, and my wife wore them, and today I will also celebrate the immortal clothes. ”
And voila! Here, Sun Wukong not only has brothers and sisters, but also a stolen wife, which is very different from the image we see in Wu Cheng'en's "Journey to the West". This is because Sun Wukong here has not yet been "reborn" and retains the color of mainland folk traditions.
Sun Wukong in Sichuan drama
In our folk, there has been a tradition of monkey spirits that has been in the same vein for a long time. This is also why Mr. Lu Xun advocates that the Huaishui water monster Wuzhiqi is the cultural archetype of Sun Wukong. Wuzhiqi is also known as Wuzhiqi and Wuzhiqi, and if we pay a little attention, we can find that the pronunciation of the second sister Wuzhi in the meta-drama is the same as it, and it should also refer to the same person. But what kind of a monster is Wuzhi Qi? What kind of relationship did he have with the Great Sage?
In the Taiping Guangji compiled by the Song Dynasty, Wuzhiqi "resembles an ape, shrinks its nose and high forehead, has a green body and a white head, and has golden eyes and snow teeth." That is to say, it looks like an ape, with a shrunken nose, a high forehead, a cyan body, a white head, golden eyes, and snow-white teeth. Imagine if you think about it, isn't this a bit scary?
The water monster has no branches
Yes, Wuzhiqi is indeed a monster. This monster was once crushed by Dayu at the foot of Guishan Mountain on the south side of the Huai River because it obstructed Dayu's control of water.
In addition to the Taiping Guangji, the Classic of Mountains and Seas also says that Wu Zhiqi was a strange demon in the Yao Shunyu period, and also the most magical and influential first strange demon in the history of the mainland. He was born in Huaguo Mountain in the Tongbai Mountains of Southern Henan and was born a divine monkey. Later, he married a dragon girl and gave birth to three sons, all of whom were magic heads. He also proclaimed himself the water god of the Huai Vortex and built the Dragon Palace in the Huai River.
As early as before Wuzhiqi, there was a folk song in the Han Dynasty's "Jiao's Yilin" that sang: "Nanshan Daxuan, steal my wife." Timidly, he did not dare to chase after him, and retreated to sleep alone. "Presumably, there are a large number of monkeys in Nanshan that have robbed my beautiful wife." I was too timid to chase it, so I had to stay alone in the empty house. Other descendants of the literati works, such as "The Legend of the General White Ape of The Supplementary River" and "Chen Patrol Inspection of Meiling's Lost Wife", also continue the traditional routine of monkey spirits robbing people's wives. It can be seen that in our traditional culture, the image of apes and monkey spirits is not very positive. The same is true of Sun Wukong in Yang Jingxian's "Journey to the West", who also robbed a princess of a country as his wife.
White ape
Because of this "monkey spirit" tradition, some places have also derived the folk custom of worship of qi tian dasheng. In addition, the southern region of our country has been prevalent in the "obscene" atmosphere since ancient times, so somehow there has been a "Great Sage of Qi Tian".
"Obscenity" means sacrificing to a god who should not be sacrificed. But in the eyes of the public, it doesn't matter what it was originally! Even if you are not a good god, as long as you stop doing evil, we will give you an offering. This also broke the hearts of several rulers, some of whom simply ordered that "obscenity" was not allowed, and even tore down these temples that should not be enshrined.
However, to this day, we can still see the stone tablets of "QiTian Dasheng" and "Tongtian Dasheng", the ruins of Qitian Dashengfu and the statues of the five brothers of Qitian Dasheng in Shunchang, Fujian Province. Moreover, every year on the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, all parts of Shunchang hold great sacred worship and folk activities, which are grand in scale and unprecedented, and sometimes reach thousands of people.
The Qitian Great Saint Sacrifice in Shunchang
Many people ridiculed the Shunchang people for treating a fictional character as a true god. Even Pu Songling's "Liaozhai Zhiyi" also records the story of such a person who did not believe in the Great Sage of Qi Tian and finally converted to the Great Sage of Qi Tian. If you are interested, you can look at it.
But the "Great Sage of Qi Tian" here cannot be equated with Sun Wukong in Wu Cheng'en's book. Because long before the novel "Journey to the West", the Qitian Dasheng faith in the Shunchang area has existed for hundreds of years. It wasn't until Wu Cheng'en was here that he began to combine the image of Sun Wukong with the "Great Sage of Qi Tian" into one person. Maybe it was because he also felt that only such a domineering title was worthy of the Monkey King in his mind.