What holds the sea in place? The old texts of China answer with a single object: an iron pillar, standing at the bottom of the Eastern Sea. It once belonged to Yu the Great, who used it to measure the rivers while he tamed the Great Flood. Then, ages later, a monkey came down asking for a weapon, and lifted it with one hand.
This episode follows the pillar from the Dragon King's treasury to the Monkey King's ear: the swords and spears that were all too light, the pillar that shrank at a word, the inscription that read thirteen thousand five hundred catties, and the king who passed his own home three times and never went inside. The strongest weapon in all the old tales, it turns out, was not made for war at all. It was made for measuring, for setting things right, and for a king who served the people before himself.
Next, three doors are left open inside this story: Yu the Great and the thirteen years he spent taming the Great Flood; the Dragon King's complaint, when he and the King of Hell went up to Heaven to complain to the Jade Emperor; and the armor, the golden coat, the phoenix crown, and the cloud walking shoes the other Dragon Kings gave the Monkey King. Leave a comment and tell us which door you want opened, and that story will get an episode of its own.
Hidden Legends of the East: Eastern legends, Gods, and miracles, explained for Western minds. New episodes every week.
Visual credits: Ancient books photograph by quillau, via Pixabay, Pixabay Content License. All other visuals are original paintings created for this channel.
What holds the sea in place?
It sounds like a strange question,
but the old texts of China answer it with a single object.
An iron pillar, standing at the bottom of the eastern sea.
The old texts say that pillar once held the waters down,
and that one day a monkey came and carried it away.
This is the story of that pillar, and of the king who took it.
The story comes from Journey to the West,
the great Chinese novel written in the 16th century.
Its hero is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King,
born from a stone on a mountain by the sea.
He had already learned the way of long life,
and he could change his shape 72 times.
But he had no weapon worthy of him.
So one day he went down under the sea,
to the palace of Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea.
Think of a Dragon King the way you might think of a Lord of the Ocean
in an old Western tale, a king whose halls lie beneath the waves.
The Monkey King asked him for a weapon that matched his strength.
The Dragon King brought out swords,
and the Monkey King swung one and said it was too light.
He brought out spears and halberds, each weighing thousands of pounds.
The Monkey King lifted each one and set it down again,
because every one of them was too light.
The Dragon King was growing desperate, and his queen spoke up.
She told him about the
iron pillar taking up space in their treasury,
a useless thing no one could move.
She said it had begun to give off a heavenly light just days before,
and that the monkey was fated to own it.
So the Dragon King led him to it.
There it stood, a pillar of black iron,
more than twenty feet tall and as wide as a barrel.
No man of the Dragon King's palace could move it at all.
The Monkey King walked up to it and lifted it with one hand.
He laughed and said it was too big, and the pillar shrank at his word.
He told it to shrink again, and it shrank again.
He carried it out into the daylight
and looked at it properly for the first time.
It had a gold hoop on each end, and words carved along its body.
The words read,
The compliant golden-hooped rod, weight 13,500 caddies.
That is about 17,500 pounds, heavier than any weapon a man could lift.
And yet, in the Monkey King's hand,
it weighed nothing, because it obeyed him.
He said, shrink, shrink, shrink,
and it became as small as an embroidery needle.
He tucked it behind his ear, the way you might tuck a pen.
Then he said, grow, grow, grow, and it became twenty feet long again.
And when he wanted to show his monkeys what it could do,
he grew 100,000 feet tall, and
the rod reached up to the 33rd heaven and down to the 18th hell.
This was no ordinary weapon.
It was the pillar that had once belonged
to a king far older than the Monkey King.
Its name in the old telling is the Divine Iron
that fixes the bottom of the Heavenly
River.
It is also called the Sea-Calming Divine Needle,
and the king who left it there was you, the
Great.
Long before the Monkey King was born, the old texts say,
a great flood covered the land of China.
The Yellow River broke its banks,
and people fled to the hills with their children and their animals.
The emperor Yao gave the task of stopping
the flood to a prince named Gun.
Gun built dams and walls of earth to block the water.
After nine years, the water broke through again,
and Gun was put to death for his failure.
His son Yu took up the task, and he worked the opposite way.
Instead of blocking the water,
he dug channels to lead it away to the sea.
He worked 13 years with his hands thick with calluses
and his feet covered in them.
In those 13 years, he passed his own home three times,
and he never once went inside.
The first time he passed, he heard his wife in labor with their son.
The second time he passed,
his son could already call out to his father.
The third time he passed, his son was more than 10 years old.
Each time, Yu said the flood was still going on,
and he could not rest while the people were homeless.
At last, the waters ran free to the sea, and the land dried.
The Emperor Shen was so moved by what Yu had done
that he passed the throne to him,
and Yu founded the Xia Dynasty, the first dynasty of China.
And the old texts say that while Yu was measuring the rivers
and fixing their depths,
he used the iron pillar.
When his work was done, he left it at the bottom of the Eastern Sea,
where it stood for ages beyond counting.
It stood there until the day a monkey came down
asking for a weapon.
Now think about what this story is really telling us.
The strongest weapon in all the old tales is not the heaviest sword
or the sharpest spear.
It is a tool that was made for measuring, for setting things right,
for giving the waters their proper depth.
A tool for a king who served the people before himself.
And it would not move for anyone in the dragon king's palace,
no matter how strong they were.
It moved only for the one it was waiting for.
The old texts say that is how a true treasure behaves.
It waits, sometimes for thousands of years, until the right hand comes.
And when that hand comes, it obeys at a single word.
That is the story of the iron pillar at the bottom of the sea.
See?
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Before you go, there are three doors left open inside this story.
The first door is Yu, the Great Himself,
and the 13 years he spent taming the Great Flood.
The second door is the Dragon King's complaint,
because after the Monkey King took the pillar,
the Dragon King and the King of Hell went up
to Heaven to complain to the Jade Emperor.
The third door is the armor.
Because the Monkey King did not leave
the Dragon Palace with the pillar alone,
and the golden coat, the phoenix crown, and the cloud walking shoes
the other Dragon Kings gave him have a story of their own.
Leave a comment and tell us which door you want opened,
and that story will get an episode of its own.
And here is my question for you.
If a treasure waited a thousand years for the right hand to come,
what is waiting for you that you have not picked up yet?
