The Stone That Opened Like an Egg

The mountain has been there since before the current dispensation of the cosmos.

Flower Fruit Mountain stands in the Eastern Sea on an island beyond the reach of ordinary navigation — not far in the way that Penglai is far, not concealed in the way that the immortal islands are concealed, but standing openly in the sea with its waterfalls and its forests of peach trees and the particular clarity of air that gathers over places where the earth’s spiritual energy has been accumulating undisturbed.

On the summit of the mountain there is a stone.

The stone is three zhang, six feet, five inches high and two zhang, four feet, four inches around. The numbers are not arbitrary — they correspond to the three hundred sixty-five days of the year and the twenty-four solar terms, respectively, which means the stone is the year in physical form, the accumulated rotation of the cosmic clock in a single object. It has been there since the splitting of the cosmic egg, since Pángǔ died and became the world. Forty-six thousand years of the mountain’s spiritual emanation has been entering the stone. It is charged.

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One morning it cracks.

The crack runs around the stone’s equator. The crack opens. From inside the crack a stone egg emerges, perfectly round, the size of a ball. The egg is exposed for a moment to the light and the wind off the Eastern Sea and it cracks again, and out of the egg comes: something with a face, something moving, something that is immediately alive in the way that very few things are immediately alive at birth — not helplessly alive, not requiring protection, but the alive of something that has been ready for a very long time.

He is a stone monkey. He is already shaped like a monkey — the snout, the ears, the tail — but the stone origin is visible in something about his quality. He is solid in the way that stone is solid. He is old in the way that stone is old. His eyes open, and from his eyes come two columns of golden light that shoot upward toward heaven.

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The Jade Emperor is in his court. His divine astronomers are monitoring the usual flows of celestial qi. The two columns of golden light from the eastern sea hit the celestial monitoring equipment like an alarm. The Emperor looks down. He examines the source. He sees: a stone monkey born from a stone egg on a mountain in the sea, whose birth has generated enough spiritual energy to light up heaven’s instruments.

He is not particularly alarmed. He has been the Jade Emperor for a very long time. He says: this is a creature of heaven and earth who has been taking in the finest essences of the sun and the moon. One need not be alarmed. He files the observation and returns to court.

The stone monkey looks around Flower Fruit Mountain. He is curious. He is hungry. He is immediately in motion — eating the fruit, drinking from the streams, finding the other monkeys, establishing himself in about ten minutes as the cleverest and most energetic being on the island. The other monkeys accept him as their leader with the consensus that forms when a genuinely exceptional individual appears and the less exceptional individuals recognize it.

He rules his mountain paradise for years.

Then he realizes he will die.

The stone egg that made him has not made him immortal — the stone gave him origin outside the biological system, but not exemption from the biological system’s end. He is as mortal as any monkey. The terror of this sends him across the sea to find the master who will teach him what cannot die, and that journey becomes everything that follows: the teaching, the heaven-disruption, the five-hundred-year mountain imprisonment, the pilgrimage, the Buddha’s palm, the title at the end that is not the one he wanted and is somehow the better one.

But the beginning is here: on the mountain in the sea, in the morning, a stone that has been waiting for the right moment cracking open in the light, and something stepping out of it that the universe did not plan for and could not have planned for, which is exactly the kind of thing the universe is always producing.