When I inherited the name Scorpion Demoness, the elders told me the whole of the old affair, beginning to end. It is not the story the storytellers tell.
Their version: the Scorpion of Pipa Cave on Poison-Enemy Mountain abducted the Tang monk to force a marriage; stung Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie; stung even the Tathagata Buddha himself, a pain past enduring. Then, on Guanyin's counsel, the Star-Officer of the Sunrise Rooster was summoned; three crows of the cock, and the Scorpion fell in her true form, dead.
All of it accurate. The clan does not deny it: the Great-Aunt committed abduction, and by law and by principle the wrong was hers.
But the storytellers omit two things.
First: why her needle could wound the Buddha at all.
The hosts of heaven are adamantine. Wukong's skull shrugs off blade, axe, thunder, and fire — yet stung by the Great-Aunt, he clutched his head and howled. The Tathagata's dharma-body repels all methods — yet one touch of the Horse-Felling Poison Stake left even him in "pain past enduring." Have you ever wondered why?
The elders say: what the Great-Aunt cultivated in that needle was never venom. It was the breaking of attachment.
The Horse-Felling Stake breaks the adamantine precisely. Where does the indestructible break? At the I-form — the more indestructible the body, the mightier the "I am" that upholds it. Her needle harms no flesh; it strikes the "I am" itself. When the Buddha cried out, it was not a finger that hurt: it was that for one instant, even the Buddha was reminded — there is still an I here, and it hurts.
That needle-way has been perfected by exactly one being in the Three Realms.
The second omission is the clan's deepest secret, told outside the mountain today for the first time — because you are bound for Vulture Peak, and you should know.
After the Great-Aunt's death, an arhat came from Thunderclap Monastery to Poison-Enemy Mountain — not to subdue, not to punish; with full courtesy, he requested and carried away her relic: the half-inch of needle-tip that had broken off against the Tathagata's finger.
The arhat left this message: the World-Honored One decrees — all beings of the Three Realms say of me, adamantine, indestructible. This needle alone once made me recall the word 'I.' Let it be enshrined, as a mirror.
The Buddha took the needle that stung him — and enshrined it. As a mirror for himself.
What the Great-Aunt would make of that, none can say. The elders say that when she played her death-song before walking into the final battle, the unwillingness in its last notes was perhaps not unwillingness to die —
but that her needle-way would end with her.
It has not ended. It has come to me. On the day of my investiture I swore at the ruins of Pipa Cave: the needle's method inherited unchanged; the needle's heart rewritten. She broke the Buddha's attachment with a needle. I will break the attachments of this present age.
What are the attachments of this age?
You have met them all along your road: the roll-call of the registry — attachment to collection. The hollow warrants — attachment to authority. The mind-bending drug — attachment to mastery. And that furnace with a world for its crucible — attachment ripened into madness. Each one more adamantine than the last.
And my needle breaks the adamantine. That is its only specialty.
The Black Turtle's people ransacked Pipa Cave hunting the whereabouts of that half needle-tip — they too understand: a needle that wounded the Buddha can equally wound whatever aspires to replace him. Fortunately, the tip is not in the cave. The tip is at Vulture Peak.
Enshrined before the Buddha.
So I travel west with the company, and my destination is yours: Vulture Peak.
Little sister A-Xiao carries her pipa on her back; I carry my needle on my tail. At the Peak, I have two matters to settle.
First, before the Buddha, to look upon the Great-Aunt's needle-tip and light one stick of incense for her — three hundred years on, her sentence is served, and the name she deserved I will win back on her behalf.
And then, tracing this road's attachments to their hardest "adamantine" —
the first line of the needle-method's oral formula, exactly as the Great-Aunt left it, I will recite for you now:
"Under heaven there is no unbreakable hardness. There is only pain not yet awakened."
Since he has taken so much that was never his, and propped up so vast an "I" —
then let there be one needle, to remind him that it hurts.