# Baigujing (白骨精): The White Bone Spirit of Journey to the West > Baigujing, the White Bone Spirit of Journey to the West: three disguises, the name written on her spine, why Wukong was banished, and how she became politics. Canonical: https://jadealmanac.com/chinese-mythology/white-bone-spirit Author: Julian (祝君瑜), Jade Almanac · https://jadealmanac.com/about Method and sourcing: https://jadealmanac.com/sources The White Bone Spirit, 白骨精 (Báigǔjīng), also called the White Bone Demon or Lady White Bone, is the demon of chapter 27 of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West. Wanting to eat the monk Tang Sanzang for immortality, she takes three shapes in one afternoon, a village girl, her aged mother and her old father, and is beaten to death three times by the Monkey King, who is then dismissed by his master for murdering a family. She is in the book for one chapter. She has never left Chinese culture. The most famous villain in *Journey to the West* is in it for one chapter. Not the [Bull Demon King](/chinese-mythology/bull-demon-king), who gets a whole arc; not the Red Boy or the Spider Women or the Yellow-Robed Monster who takes over the moment she is gone. The White Bone Spirit, Báigǔjīng, is chapter 27 and nothing else. She has no lair we visit, no back-story, no dialogue with the hero, and no name until she is a heap of bones with a line of writing down the spine. And yet ask any Chinese child to name a monster from the book and this is the one: the demon who tried three disguises in one afternoon, was killed three times, and won anyway, because the one thing she managed to do was get the Monkey King fired. ## Lady Bone Demon, Gong Li, and a kung fu panda If she has a face for you, it is probably one of three. Children who watched LEGO's *Monkie Kid* know her as Lady Bone Demon, the cool-voiced spirit who is the main villain of the second and third seasons, wants to burn the world clean, and never stays long in any one body, which is the truest thing an adaptation has done with her. Film-goers know Gong Li, who played the White Bone Demon in the 2016 blockbuster *The Monkey King 2*, whose Chinese title is the episode's popular name, *Sun Wukong Thrice Beats the White Bone Demon*, and which made, Wikipedia records, some 194 million dollars turning one afternoon of the book into two hours. Younger viewers met her, name and all, as a villain in *Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny*, which is roughly the point at which a Chinese demon has become an international one. And players of the 2024 game *Black Myth: Wukong* have noticed that she is mentioned in the sixth chapter in a way that fans, and now the encyclopedias, read as a lost love of the Monkey King. The novel offers no support for that whatever; he beats her to death within minutes of meeting her, three times. But it tells you something that a character with seven thousand characters of text to her name can still be cast as anyone's lost love four hundred years later. ## The demon who became a political cartoon She has also been, at intervals, the most dangerous woman in Chinese politics, which is a strange fate for a skeleton. It began with an opera. The Zhang family of Shaoxing have played the Monkey King for four generations, and the third-generation Monkey, Zhang Zongyi, whose stage name was Six-Year-Old Child and whose title was the Southern Monkey King, made *Sun Wukong Thrice Beats the White Bone Demon* his signature piece. It was filmed. In 1961 Guo Moruo, the most senior literary figure in the People's Republic, saw the film and wrote a poem, in the classical eight-line form, that took the monk's side against no one and the monster's side against the monk: the priest "was kind to foes and vicious to friends," Guo wrote, and "deserved to be torn limb from limb." Mao Zedong, who read everything Guo wrote, answered on 17 November 1961 with a poem of his own, and it is the reply that everyone learned. "A thunderstorm burst over the earth," it begins in the Selected Works translation, "so a devil rose from a heap of white bones." The monk, Mao corrected his friend, was merely "deluded" and could be taught; it was "the malignant demon" that had to be destroyed; and the last couplet, "Today, a miasmal mist once more rising, / We hail Sun Wu-kung, the wonder-worker," has generally been read, in the year of the Sino-Soviet split, as a verdict on Moscow. From then on the White Bone Demon was a political noun. She was revisionism; she was the enemy who looks like a friend; the monk who could not tell them apart was every comrade who needed correcting. Then the wheel turned. In 1976, the year Mao's widow Jiang Qing and her allies were arrested, a poster was designed with the title *Monkey thrice beats the White Bone Demon*. It was published in 1977, and the site that catalogs the Landsberger collection of Chinese propaganda notes drily that "seen from the chronology, such a reading of the image is quite appropriate": the demon was Jiang Qing, the monkey was the Chinese people, and everyone who bought the poster knew it. The veteran designers, asked later, said it was "pure coincidence." The demon who had been Khrushchev was now the Chairman's wife. She had changed shape again. The slang caught up in peacetime. Wiktionary's entry for the name lists, after the character herself, the senses "wicked woman" and "cunning person," and then a dated piece of office jargon from the 2000s: *báigǔjīng* as the first syllables of *báilǐng*, white-collar, *gǔgàn*, backbone, and *jīngyīng*, elite, the ambitious young professional woman, said with a grin. A skeleton demon from a Ming novel spent a decade as the Chinese equivalent of "girlboss." That is a career. ## The family business One more thread before the story, because it is the kind of thing only a Chinese reader would know to tell you. The Monkey King who fought the White Bone Demon on stage and screen in the 1960s was Zhang Zongyi. The Monkey King everyone in China pictures, the one from the 1986 television series that has been rerun every summer holiday for forty years, is Liu Xiao Ling Tong, which is a stage name that means, roughly, Little Six-Year-Old Child, because he is Zhang Zongyi's son and took his father's name with a "little" in front of it, as Wikipedia explains. The father beat the White Bone Demon for Mao. The son beat her for everyone born after. When the son's series reached chapter 27 the episode was, naturally, the one everyone remembers. ## Three disguises, one afternoon Now the chapter itself, which is better than any of its adaptations, because it is a comedy about seeing. The pilgrims have stopped on a high mountain, the monk is hungry, and the Monkey King has gone off to find him some peaches. That is when the demon, riding a "dark wind" above the ridge, sees the monk sitting on the ground and says the sentence that drives the whole second half of the novel. "What luck, what luck," she says. "For years everyone has been saying that the Tang monk from the East is going to fetch the scriptures, that he is the Golden Cicada reborn, a body that has cultivated itself for ten lives, and that whoever eats a piece of his flesh will live forever." This is the first time anyone in the book says it out loud. Every demon from here to India will be after the same snack, and the White Bone Spirit is the one who announces the menu. She cannot simply grab him; the pig and the sand-monk are sitting beside him, and though they are not much, the novel notes, they were once a marshal of Heaven and a general of the curtain and still carry the whiff of it. So she decides to "play with him a little," and the rest of the chapter is her three costumes, laid out here the way the text lays them out: | Disguise | What she brings or says | What gives her away | How she gets out | |---|---|---|---| | A village girl, "a face like the moon and cheeks like flowers," carrying a jar and a bottle | A lunch of fragrant rice and wheat gluten for the holy men, and a story about pious parents and a husband | The Monkey King's eyes; the jar is full of maggots, the bottle of frogs | The corpse-shedding trick: she leaves a fake body under the staff and escapes | | Her mother, eighty years old, bent over a stick, "temples like ice and snow" | She has come looking for her daughter | Arithmetic: an eighteen-year-old's mother cannot be eighty | The same trick, a second fake corpse | | Her father, white-haired, with a dragon-headed cane and a rosary, reciting sutras | He has come looking for his wife and daughter | Nothing the monk can see; the Monkey King simply knows | None. The third body is real, and it is bones | The middle row is my favorite thing in the chapter, and nobody adapts it. The pig, who has been slandering Wukong all afternoon, announces that the old woman must be the dead girl's mother, and the Monkey King answers with a sum. "That girl was eighteen and this old woman is eighty. How does a woman have a child at over sixty? It is a fake for certain." He is the only person on the mountain doing arithmetic. The monk is doing theology, the pig is doing politics, and the demon is doing costume. The one who counts is the one who is right, and the one who is right is the one who gets punished. ## The pile of bones with writing on it The third time he kills her, she stays dead, and the text describes what is left with a clinical little shrug: "a heap of chalk-white bones lying there." The monk is horrified in exactly the wrong direction. This man only just died, he says; how has he turned into a skeleton? And the Monkey King explains, in a sentence that quietly tells you what she was: "He was a stiff corpse that hid a spirit and made mischief." The word he uses is *jiangshi*, the same word that means the hopping corpse of a thousand Hong Kong films, and which has [its own page here](/chinese-mythology/jiangshi). The chapter's title agrees: it calls her the corpse-demon, *shimo*. She is not, in the book, a spirit that became a skeleton. She is a skeleton that became a spirit. There is a difference, and the novel is careful about it: she is dead matter that learned to move, which is why every body she wears is a corpse she sheds. Then the name. "There is a line of writing along his spine," Wukong says. "It reads: Lady White Bone." That is all. The novel does not say who wrote it, or when, or why a demon would carry her name on her skeleton like a museum label. The monk, to his credit, half believes it. Why the novelist put her only name where nobody could read it until she was dead, we do not know. What we can say is that every later telling that gives her a palace, a history, a grievance and a wardrobe is furnishing an empty room. In the book she is a costume with bones inside, and the writing on the bones is the whole of her biography. ## The letter The demon's victory comes from the pig. [Zhu Bajie](/chinese-mythology/zhu-bajie), who resents Wukong for reasons the whole novel is about, leans over and tells the monk that the bones are a trick: the monkey has faked a skeleton, he says, so that the master will not recite the headband spell. The monk, "soft-eared" as the text calls him, believes it, and recites it, and the Monkey King is on his knees in the road begging him to stop. Then the master does something he has never done before and will not do again. He has the sand-monk fetch paper and brush, grinds ink on a rock with water from the stream, and writes out a letter of dismissal: "Monkey, take this as your proof. I will not have you as a disciple again. If I ever see you again, may I fall into the Avici hell." Wukong takes the letter, folds it into his sleeve, and tries three more times to be forgiven. He kneels; the monk turns his back. He splits himself into four monkeys so that the master cannot avoid being bowed to; the monk will not look. He asks, finally, only that if a demon ever seizes the master, the master should mention that his first disciple is the Great Sage, because the monsters of the western road are afraid of the name. And the monk answers with the cruelest line in the book: "I am a good monk. I will not speak the name of a wicked man like you. Go back." So he goes, weeping, somersaulting home to his mountain, and by the next chapter the master has been captured by a demon he cannot see either, and the pig is on his way to beg the monkey to come back. The White Bone Spirit is a heap of bones on a hillside. She has just won the only round anyone ever won against Sun Wukong. ## Why she has no backstory "But surely," you may say, "the monk is just being kind? He sees a girl. He sees an old woman. What is he supposed to do?" That is exactly the question the chapter is built to ask, and it is why she has no backstory. The White Bone Spirit is not a character. She is a test of vision, and a test needs no biography. Every one of her shapes is a shape a good person is obliged to trust: a girl bringing food to monks, a mother looking for her daughter, a devout old man with a rosary. The Monkey King's crime is that he can see through virtue. The monk's crime is that he cannot. The novel, which is a Buddhist book under the fireworks, does not resolve this. It sends the monkey home and gets the monk captured, so that both of them are wrong. The scholar I-Hsien Wu, in a 2023 article in the journal *Religions* called "Lady White Bone: The Making of a Monstress," traces where a skeleton like this comes from: the older Chinese tales of anomalies in which corpses and skeletons get up and walk, and the Buddhist meditation practice called white-bone contemplation, in which the monk pictures the body of a beautiful woman as the skeleton it will be, so that desire dies. That practice produced a phrase, "beauty is white bone," which is the doctrine that form is emptiness, rendered, as Wu puts it, in a highly gendered form. The White Bone Spirit is that phrase turned into a plot. She is the beautiful girl and the skeleton at once, and the only one who can see both is the monkey who was born from a stone and has no desire to fool. Chinese readers keep her because she is useful. "Three beatings of the White Bone Demon," *sān dǎ Báigǔjīng*, is a phrase for seeing through someone who keeps coming back in a new disguise, and a phrase for the fate of the person who does the seeing. The fox spirit, [her only rival as the book's shapeshifting temptress](/chinese-mythology/fox-spirit), at least has a history and a species. Lady White Bone has a spine with her name on it, a jar of maggots, and an afternoon. It has been enough. ## Primary sources - Journey to the West (西游记), Chapter 27, the demon sees the monk, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original (see Anthony C. Yu's standard translation), c. 1592 > 造化，造化。幾年家人都講東土的唐和尚取大乘，他本是金蟬子化身，十世修行的原體，有人吃他一塊肉，長壽長生。真個今日到了。 > What luck, what luck. For years everyone has been saying that the Tang monk from the East is going to fetch the Great Vehicle scriptures, that he is the Golden Cicada reborn, a body that has cultivated itself for ten lives, and that whoever eats a piece of his flesh will live forever. And today he has actually arrived. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第027回 - Journey to the West (西游记), Chapter 27, the first disguise, and the lunch, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, c. 1592 > 好妖精，停下陰風，在那山凹裡搖身一變，變做個月貌花容的女兒，說不盡那眉清目秀，齒白唇紅。左手提著一個青砂罐兒，右手提著一個綠磁瓶兒……那裡是甚香米飯，卻是一罐子拖尾巴的長蛆；也不是麵觔，卻是幾個青蛙、癩蝦蟆，滿地亂跳。 > The fine demon halted her dark wind, shook herself in a hollow of the mountain, and turned into a girl with a face like the moon and cheeks like flowers, clear-browed, bright-eyed, white-toothed, red-lipped, beyond describing. In her left hand she carried a little blue-glazed jar and in her right a little green porcelain bottle. ... It was no fragrant rice: it was a jar of long maggots with trailing tails. And no wheat gluten either: frogs and toads, hopping all over the ground. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第027回 - Journey to the West (西游记), Chapter 27, the Monkey King does the arithmetic on the second disguise, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, c. 1592 > 行者道：「兄弟莫要胡說，那女子十八歲，這老婦有八十歲，怎麼六十多歲還生產？斷乎是個假的，等老孫去看來。」 > The Monkey King said: "Don't talk nonsense, brother. That girl was eighteen and this old woman is eighty. How does a woman have a child at over sixty? It is a fake for certain. Let old Sun go and look." https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第027回 - Journey to the West (西游记), Chapter 27, the bones, and the name on the spine, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, c. 1592 > 卻是一堆粉骷髏在那裡。唐僧大驚道：「悟空，這個人才死了，怎麼就化作一堆骷髏？」行者道：「他是個潛靈作怪的僵尸，在此迷人敗本，被我打殺，他就現了本相。他那脊梁上有一行字，叫做『白骨夫人』。」 > It was a heap of chalk-white bones lying there. The monk was shocked: "Wukong, this person only just died. How has he turned into a heap of bones?" The Monkey King said: "He was a stiff corpse that hid a spirit and made mischief, and was here to beguile people and ruin them. I beat him to death and he showed his true form. There is a line of writing along his spine. It reads: Lady White Bone." https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第027回 - Journey to the West (西游记), Chapter 27, the letter of dismissal, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, c. 1592 > 寫了一紙貶書，遞於行者道：「猴頭，執此為照，再不要你做徒弟了；如再與你相見，我就墮了阿鼻地獄。」……唐僧道：「我是個好和尚，不題你這歹人的名字，你回去罷。」 > He wrote out a letter of dismissal and handed it to the Monkey King: "Monkey, take this as your proof. I will not have you as a disciple again. If I ever see you again, may I fall into the Avici hell." ... The monk said: "I am a good monk. I will not speak the name of a wicked man like you. Go back." https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第027回 ## Pop culture appearances - Lego Monkie Kid · anime · 2020 · released · Lady Bone Demon, the main antagonist of the second and third seasons, a body-hopping spirit who wants to end the world and start it clean · Lady Bone Demon · The series keeps the one thing the novel gives her: she is never in her own body for long. - The Monkey King 2 (西游记之孙悟空三打白骨精) · film · 2016 · released · Gong Li's White Bone Demon, who has been eating people to escape the wheel of rebirth and wants the monk to end it for good; the film's whole plot is chapter 27 · White Bone Demon - Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny · anime · 2018 · released · A major antagonist of the series, which borrows her name and her habit of wearing other people · Baigujing - Black Myth: Wukong · game · 2024 · released · Mentioned in Chapter 6; players and the encyclopedias read the game as implying she was once the Monkey King's love, which the novel gives no hint of · Baigujing ## Sources - Journey to the West (西遊記), Chapter 27, full text (Chinese Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第027回 - Anthony C. Yu, 'The Journey to the West', Revised Edition (University of Chicago Press), the standard English translation: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo12079590.html - Mao Zedong, 'Reply to Comrade Kuo Mo-jo' (17 November 1961), with Guo Moruo's poem on the opera film, in the Selected Works edition (marxists.org): https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/poems/poems31.htm - 'Monkey thrice beats the White Bone Demon', 1977 poster, with the Jiang Qing reading and the designers' denial (chineseposters.net): https://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-327 - I-Hsien Wu, 'Lady White Bone: The Making of a Monstress', Religions 14 (2023), no. 542: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14040542 - The dictionary entry for 白骨精, with the slang senses (Wiktionary): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/白骨精 - Baigujing, adaptations (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baigujing - The Monkey King 2 (2016) (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_King_2 - Zhang Zongyi, Liu Ling Tong, the Southern Monkey King (Chinese Wikipedia): https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/六龄童 - Liu Xiao Ling Tong, the 1986 Monkey King (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiao_Ling_Tong ## FAQ **Who is the White Bone Spirit in Journey to the West?** A demon who lives on White Tiger Ridge and wants to eat the monk Tang Sanzang, because, as she says in chapter 27, everyone knows that a piece of his flesh grants eternal life. She cannot get near him with his disciples on guard, so she tries trickery: three disguises in one afternoon. The Monkey King sees through each one and kills it, and each time she slips away by a corpse-shedding trick, leaving a fake body behind, until the third blow is real and she is a pile of bones with the words Lady White Bone written down her spine. **What are the three disguises of the White Bone Spirit?** First a beautiful village girl bringing a lunch of fragrant rice and wheat gluten to the monks, which is really a jar of maggots and a bottle of frogs. Second, an eighty-year-old woman on a stick, come looking for her daughter; the Monkey King points out that an eighty-year-old cannot be the mother of an eighteen-year-old. Third, a white-haired old man with a dragon-headed cane and a rosary, reciting sutras, come looking for his wife and child. The novel's title for the chapter is "The corpse-demon three times tricks Tang Sanzang." **Why did Tang Sanzang banish Sun Wukong?** Because from where he sat, his disciple had just beaten to death a young woman, then her mother, then her father. The Monkey King shows him the bones and the name on the spine, and the monk half believes him, until the pig Zhu Bajie whispers that Wukong has faked the bones to escape the headband spell. The monk recites the spell, writes out a letter of dismissal, and refuses even to speak Wukong's name. It is the most famous of the Monkey King's dismissals, and it is the demon's real victory. **Why is Lady Bone Demon evil?** In Lego Monkie Kid, Lady Bone Demon wants to destroy the world and remake it, and possesses other people's bodies to do it. That is the show's invention, but it is built on the novel: the original White Bone Spirit has no body of her own worth keeping, only a skeleton and a talent for wearing other shapes, and her one aim is to eat a monk to live forever. The novel never explains why she is evil, because it never explains her at all. She is in one chapter, and the chapter is about the monk, not about her. **What does Baigujing mean?** Literally "white bone spirit," or "white bone essence": bai is white, gu is bone, jing is the word for a thing that has cultivated itself into a spirit, the same word used for fox spirits. It is a description, not a name. The only name the novel gives her is Lady White Bone, and only as a line of writing found on her skeleton. In modern Chinese slang a Baigujing is a scheming woman, and for a while in the 2000s it was office jargon for a white-collar, backbone, elite career woman, from the first syllables of those three words. **Was the White Bone Spirit Sun Wukong's lover?** Not in the novel, where they never exchange a word she means and he kills her on sight. The idea comes from adaptations. The 2016 film The Monkey King 2 gives Gong Li's demon a long negotiation with the monk, and the 2024 game Black Myth: Wukong mentions her in a way players have read as a lost love. Those are readings of the game, not of the book. In chapter 27 she is a monster with a lunch basket, and he is a disciple about to lose his job.