Bull Demon King (牛魔王): The Monkey King's Sworn Brother and the Fight at Flame Mountain

Every hero needs one opponent he cannot simply beat, and the Monkey King's is a bull. The Bull Demon King, Niú Mówáng, is the eldest of Sun Wukong's sworn brothers, a demon lord with a wife who owns a magic fan, a mistress who owns a fortune, and a son who breathes fire, and when the two old friends finally fight, in chapters 59 to 61 of Journey to the West, the novel gives them the longest, strangest and most evenly matched duel in the book. He is the villain of the first animated feature ever made in Asia. He is the father-in-law of Goku. He is the boss of a chapter of the most successful Chinese video game ever made. And he is, when you strip the armor off, a white bull the size of a mountain range, which is how the book prefers to leave him.

The Bull King in your living room

You have probably met him without the introduction. In Black Myth: Wukong, the 2024 game that sold ten million copies in its first three days, Chapter 5 is set on the Flaming Mountains, and its whole plot is the Bull King's broken household: the player arrives in disguise, claiming to be the Bull King's daughter, and the summary on Wikipedia records what happens next, "the Bull King sees through the ruse and recognizes his son Red Boy," after which the son seizes the relic the father was about to hand over and the chapter ends in a family tragedy. If you watched Dragon Ball as a child you know him as the Ox-King, Chi-Chi's enormous, gentle father, who in the early episodes lives on a burning mountain: his Japanese name, Gyūmaō, is the Bull Demon King's three characters read aloud in Japanese, and the burning mountain is the Flame Mountain with the serial numbers filed off. Akira Toriyama took Goku from Wukong and took the neighbors with him. He is the Demon Bull King of LEGO's Monkie Kid series, complete with Princess Iron Fan and a son renamed Red Son, and he has turned up in Doraemon, in Hong Kong films, and in every television Journey to the West since the 1980s. None of them agree on what he looks like, because the novel only describes him properly once, and it is not a man.

Asia's first animated feature was about him

Before any of that, he was the first cartoon villain in Chinese history. Princess Iron Fan, released in Shanghai in November 1941 by the brothers Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan, was the first full-length animated film made in China and, by most reckonings, the first in Asia: seventy-three minutes of ink-black bull and rubber-limbed monkey, made in a city at war. The plot is chapters 59 to 61 with the ending rewritten for wartime: the pilgrims cannot beat the Bull King alone, so the villagers of the Flame Mountain join in, and together they bring him down and win the fan. A sixteen-year-old in Osaka saw it and decided to draw for a living. His name was Osamu Tezuka, and there is a reasonable case that Japanese animation, and therefore Goku's father-in-law, descends from a Chinese cartoon about a bull.

Big brother

Now the book. The Bull King arrives early and without explanation. In chapter 3, before the havoc in Heaven, the newly immortal Monkey King is touring the world looking for friends worth having, and "took up with six sworn brothers: the Bull Demon King, the Flood Dragon Demon King, the Roc Demon King, the Lion Camel King, the Macaque King and the Snub-Nosed Monkey King, seven in all counting the Handsome Monkey King himself." Each has a grand title, and Wukong recites them thirty-eight chapters later when he needs to prove to Red Boy that he knew the boy's father: the Bull King is "the Great Sage Who Pacifies Heaven," and, Wukong adds, "we let him be the eldest." It is the only time in the novel that the Monkey King, who promoted himself to Great Sage Equal to Heaven and picked a fight with the Jade Emperor over the title, concedes precedence to anyone. The bull was there first, and was bigger.

A household, which no other demon has

What makes the Bull King different from every other monster on the road is that he has a family, and it is a mess. His wife is Princess Iron Fan, whom the text also calls the Rakshasi, a demoness with a palm-leaf fan that can put out a mountain of fire with one wave. Their son is Red Boy, the Great King Holy Infant, a child demon who breathes true fire and who, back in chapter 41, captured the monk and was subdued by Guanyin, who kept him as her attendant. The parents regard this as a kidnapping. And the Bull King has left home. When Wukong tracks him down in chapter 60, the local earth god explains that he is living in a cave on Thunder-Piling Mountain with the Jade-Faced Princess, the orphaned daughter of a fox king, who "had a fortune of a million with no one to manage it," heard of the Bull King's powers, and, the text says with a straight face, "offered to bring her wealth as dowry and take him as her husband. The Bull King abandoned the Rakshasi and has not been back since." A sworn brother of the hero, a bitter wife with the one object the hero needs, a rich mistress, and a son in the custody of a bodhisattva. No wonder the borrowing takes three chapters.

The fire was Wukong's

Here is the detail that turns the episode from a monster fight into a comedy of consequences. The Flame Mountain is eight hundred li of fire with not an inch of grass anywhere around it, and Wukong assumes, reasonably, that the Bull King lit it. The earth god corrects him, and the correction is worth having in full: "This fire was set by you, Great Sage. Five hundred years ago, when you made havoc in Heaven, Erlang captured you and delivered you to Laozi, who put you in his Eight Trigrams furnace. When the lid was lifted after the smelting, you kicked the furnace over, and a few bricks fell out with fire still in them, landed here, and became the Flame Mountain." The earth god, it turns out, was the boy who tended the furnace, demoted to this posting for letting it happen. Wukong, who does not enjoy being told things, tells him he is talking nonsense and only half believes him. But the book means it. The fire the pilgrims cannot cross is the Monkey King's own, five hundred years old, and the grudge that keeps the fan from him is the Monkey King's own too, since it was he who handed Red Boy to Guanyin. The Bull King's whole episode is Wukong walking into the consequences of Wukong.

Borrowing the fan, three times

The chapter titles say it plainly: Wukong "borrows" the fan three times, and each attempt is a different kind of trick. The first is the belly trick. Princess Iron Fan, who has no intention of lending anything to the monkey who took her son, fans him clean off the mountain; he comes back with a wind-fixing pill, is fanned again and does not move, and when she retreats inside he turns into a tiny insect, rides into her stomach on the foam of a cup of tea, and negotiates from the inside, addressing her throughout as sister-in-law. She gives him a fan. It is the wrong fan: the first wave of it makes the fire worse.

The second is the disguise swap, and it is the funniest sequence in the episode. Wukong finds the Bull King at the fox princess's cave, is refused, follows him to a banquet under a lake, steals his mount, a water-parting golden-eyed beast, rides to Princess Iron Fan's cave wearing the Bull King's shape, and is welcomed home by a wife who has had a few drinks and is glad to see him. She hands over the real fan and, in bed, tells him how to shrink it. He flies off in triumph with the fan grown to twelve feet and no idea how to make it small again. The Bull King, discovering the theft, returns the compliment: he turns himself into Zhu Bajie, meets Wukong on the road, offers to carry the fan for a while, and is handed it. The third attempt is simply a fight, with the real Bajie and the earth god's troops joining in, and it is the fight the whole world remembers.

The duel of shapes, and the white bull

Losing the ground battle, the Bull King drops his armor and his iron club and flies off as a swan. What follows is a transformation duel in the exact shape of the one Wukong fought against Erlang in chapter 6, except that this time the monkey is the hunter. The text lays out the moves like a card game, and a table is the only honest way to show it:

Then the Bull King stops playing. "He gave a little laugh and showed his true form: a great white bull, its head like a mountain ridge, its eyes like flashes of lightning, its two horns like a pair of iron pagodas, its teeth a row of blades, more than a thousand fathoms from head to tail and eight hundred from hoof to back." He asks the monkey what he proposes to do about it, and Wukong answers by growing ten thousand fathoms tall, with a head like Mount Tai and a mouth like a pool of blood, and the two of them shake the mountains until every god in the neighborhood comes to watch. This is the image the painting at the top of this page is built on, because it is the only physical description the novel ever gives him, and it is not a man with horns. It is livestock at the scale of geography.

The demon who was not killed

The ending is the part the adaptations most often change, and it is worth keeping straight. The gods surround him. He runs. He is intercepted by Li Jing, the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King, and his son Nezha, sent by the Jade Emperor at the Buddha's own request. Nezha cuts off his head and another grows; ten heads, ten times. Nezha hangs his fire-wheels on the bull's horns and blows, and the bull roars and thrashes. And then, in the text's own words, "the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King fixed his true form in the demon-revealing mirror, and he could not move or change, and had no way out but to cry: Spare my life! I will gladly submit to the Buddha's house." Nezha threads his binding cord through the bull's nostrils and leads him off by hand, the way a farmer leads an ox. Princess Iron Fan gives up the real fan to save her husband. The fire goes out under three waves of it, rain falls, and the chapter's closing poem records the outcome in a single line: "the bull led to the Buddha, his wildness done."

Note what did not happen. He was not killed, as most monsters in the book are; he was not revealed to be some god's runaway pet, as many of the rest turn out to be. He surrendered, and the surrender was accepted, and Heaven's officers walked him off to the western paradise by the nose. The novel is generous with its endings for the people it likes, and it liked the Bull King. He had, after all, been the Monkey King's big brother.

Is he stronger than Wukong?

The fair reading is that the book refuses to answer, and the refusal is the point. They fight from the hour of the rabbit into the hour of the dragon and break off by mutual consent. They match each other transformation for transformation. When Wukong finally wins it is because Bajie's rake joins in, because the earth god's spirit soldiers block the cave, and because the entire apparatus of Heaven, fire-wheels, mirror, cord and all, is sent to hold one bull still. Everyone else on the road Wukong beats, or outwits, or has removed by a phone call to the relevant bodhisattva. The Bull King he has to be helped with. And the novel, in its opening chapters, had already settled their ranking the only way that matters to two proud demons who once drank together: when the seven brothers swore, the monkey let the bull go first.

So that is who is glaring at you from the poster, the game, the cartoon and the anime: not a boss, and not a minotaur, but the Monkey King's eldest sworn brother, a bull the size of a landscape, with a marriage in ruins and a son in the custody of the Goddess of Mercy, who guarded a fire the hero had started and lost the fight to the hero's whole army, and who, of all the demons on that long road to India, was one of the very few allowed to walk away.