On Sun Wukong’s Seventy-Two Transformations

On Sun Wukong’s Seventy-Two Transformations

If you only read Journey to the West without looking into related source materials, it is easy to come away with the mistaken idea that the so-called Seventy-Two Transformations simply means transforming into seventy-two different things. In reality, Sun Wukong demonstrates many abilities beyond changing his outward form. For example, he can make people drowsy with sleeping bugs, compress distance, carry mountains, and perform various other magical arts that have nothing to do with bodily transformation. How should these powers be understood? Before I came across explanatory materials, I was puzzled as well. It was only after reading a detailed account of the Seventy-Two Transformations that everything clicked.

In Romance of the Immortals Through the Ages by the Qing dynasty writer Xu Dao, the Seventy-Two Transformations are listed one by one as follows: “Communion with the unseen, commanding spirits, carrying mountains, forbidding water, borrowing wind, spreading mist, praying for clear skies, praying for rain, sitting in fire, entering water, covering the sun, riding the wind, boiling stones, spitting flames, swallowing blades, the gourd-heaven art, divine travel, walking on water, staff-release, splitting the body, invisibility, reattaching the head, immobilization, slaying demons, summoning immortals, pursuing souls, seizing spirits, calling clouds, fetching the moon, transporting objects, dream transference, dismemberment, staff substitution, cutting off a current, averting disaster, resolving misfortune, alchemy of gold and silver, sword arts, hidden-object divination, earth travel, star calculation, forming arrays, false forms, transformation by spraying, transformation by pointing, corpse liberation, shifting scenery, summoning, sending away, gathering beasts, taming birds, breath restraint, great strength, passing through stone, emitting light, barrier arts, daoyin exercises, ingesting essences, opening walls, leaping across crags, omen-reading, ascending in secret, drinking water, lying in snow, enduring the blazing sun, juggling pellets, talisman water, medicine, knowing the time, knowing the land, grain avoidance, and nightmare curses.”

This explanation fits well with the divine powers Sun Wukong displays in Journey to the West. In the novel, when he goes underwater, it says he uses a “water-avoiding method,” which would correspond to the art of “entering water.” When competing in magic against the three spirits of the tiger, deer, and ram, he uses such arts as praying for clear skies, praying for rain, sitting in fire, reattaching the head, and hidden-object divination. When he uses White Dragon Horse’s urine to treat the king’s illness, that reflects his powers in talisman water and medicine. And among the abilities most memorable from the TV adaptations, I think the best known is probably his immobilization spell, with which he can freeze whomever he chooses. Looking at it this way, aside from the somersault cloud—which seems to have been specially tailored to Sun Wukong himself—all of the abilities he demonstrates in Journey to the West actually fall within the category of the Seventy-Two Transformations, because the only skills he truly learned were the Seventy-Two Transformations and the somersault cloud.

Looking further into it, the Seventy-Two Transformations are not, in essence, combat spells. Rather, they are methods used by Daoist cultivators on their path of defying heaven. Since immortality runs against the natural order, cultivation is in fact at odds with the Daoist principle of following nature—one of the fundamental contradictions within Daoist theory. These arts serve as supporting means for dealing with the three calamities of heavenly thunder, heavenly fire, and heavenly wind that confront those who seek eternal life. They are auxiliary techniques within the foundational Daoist theory of attaining immortality; Sun Wukong simply learned to apply them flexibly to the many situations he encountered on the journey west.

Sun Wukong’s Seventy-Two Transformations belong to the Earthly Fiend set, and this is clear from the very beginning of his training. He chose to learn the more numerous set, and thus studied the Earthly Fiend Seventy-Two Transformations, while Zhu Bajie learned the Heavenly Constellation Thirty-Six Transformations from another master. Although throughout Journey to the West Zhu Bajie is never a match for Sun Wukong, that does not mean the Thirty-Six Transformations are inferior to the Seventy-Two. Judging by the names alone, the Thirty-Six actually sound far more formidable: reversing creation, inverting yin and yang, moving stars and shifting constellations, turning back heaven and restoring the sun, calling rain and summoning wind, shaking mountains and earth, riding mist and soaring on clouds, carving rivers into land, traversing the earth in golden light, overturning rivers and churning seas, turning ground into steel, great escapes through the five phases, the wondrous gates of the six jia, foreknowing the future, driving mountains and moving rocks, reviving the dead, flying in person while concealing one’s traces,

regulating breath through nine cycles, drawing forth primordial yang, subduing dragons and taming tigers, mending heaven and bathing the sun, pushing mountains and filling seas, turning stone into gold, standing upright without a shadow, transforming the body from the womb, changing size at will, making flowers bloom in an instant, roaming in spirit and commanding qi, seeing through walls, turning back wind and fire, wielding the five thunders, hiding in the abyss and shrinking the land, raising flying sand and moving stones, carrying mountains across the sea, scattering beans to create soldiers, and the seven-arrow nail-head curse.

As for why Zhu Bajie, despite learning the seemingly more powerful Thirty-Six Transformations, is still no match for Sun Wukong, I can think of several possible explanations. First, the master may not have been as good; Zhu Bajie’s teacher may simply have been inferior to Sun Wukong’s. Second, although the Thirty-Six are fewer in number, the Heavenly Constellation transformations may be much harder to cultivate—their names alone suggest techniques of extraordinary difficulty, and mastering them would not be easy. Third, Sun Wukong’s talent and diligence are beyond comparison with ordinary beings. Innately, he was born from the spiritual essence of heaven and earth, a natural endowment no one else could rival; whatever cultivation method he learned, he could master it. And in terms of acquired effort, Sun Wukong was extremely hardworking during his period of study, something I suspect Zhu Bajie and most other demons and spirits could hardly match. Looking across the whole of Journey to the West, the Heavenly Constellation and Earthly Fiend transformations do not seem to have been absolutely secret methods, nor were there only one or two practitioners. Yet among those who cultivated the Seventy-Two Transformations to true greatness, only a few stand out—Sun Wukong, the Bull Demon King, and Erlang Shen.