In an earlier post, we discussed how powerful is the Monkey King and completed a catalog of Sun Wukong’s magic abilities and skills.
Today, we will talk about one of his controversial magic powers, the Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils (also called Fiery Eyes and Diamond Pupils or Fiery Eyes Golden Gaze) which he gained by accident after being smelted in Laozi’s Eight Trigram Furnace.
In film and TV adaptations of Journey to the West, we often see Sun Wukong open his eyes and instantly recognize disguised immortals or demons, as if his gaze could directly perceive their true forms. This ability is always attributed to his Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils (Fiery Eyes and Diamond Pupils). But in the original novel, is his Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils truly that formidable?
In Journey to the West, Sun Wukong’s Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils are not an ability to directly perceive truth. In reality, they are an eye ailment caused by smoke exposure inside the Eight-Trigrams Furnace during his ordeal.
The Great Sage crawled into the space beneath the compartment that corresponded to the Xun trigram. Now Xun symbolizes wind; where there is wind, there is no fire. However, wind could churn up smoke, which at that moment reddened his eyes, giving them a permanently inflamed condition. Hence they were sometimes called Fiery Eyes and Diamond Pupils.
— Journey to the West, Chapter 7
Since this eye injury, Sun Wukong has become extremely sensitive to smoke. Exposure to smoke becomes unbearable for him. The most typical example is when the Tang Monk and his disciples encounter Red Boy. The fire and smoke spewed from Red Boy’s mouth nearly cost Sun Wukong his life. Sun Wukong wasn’t actually afraid of the fire itself; it was the smoke he feared. At that time, after being smoked, Sun Wukong, in unbearable pain, leapt into a river and actually fainted. This clearly shows the significant side effects of his Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils.
When the fiend saw him approaching, he blew a mouthful of smoke right at his face. Pilgrim tried to tum away swiftly, but he was so dazed by the smoke that tears fell from his eyes like rain. This Great Sage, you see, could not be hurt by fire but he was afraid of smoke. For during that year when he greatly disturbed the Heavenly Palace, he was placed in the eight-trigram brazier of Laozi, where he had been smelted for a long time. He managed to crawl into the space beneath the compartment which corresponded to the Sun trigram and was not burned. The smoke whipped up by the wind, however, gave him a pair of fiery eyes and diamond pupils, and that was the reason why even now he was afraid of smoke. Once more, the fiend spat out a mouthful of smoke and the Great Sage could no longer withstand it.
— Journey to the West, Chapter 41
However, every cloud has a silver lining. Being exposed to smoke and fire acted, in a way, as a form of training for his eyes. The Monkey King thus gained an unexpected benefit: his vision was enhanced, allowing him to see a thousand miles during the day and possess night vision.
He dropped down quickly from the clouds to the bank of the river, saying, “Master, it’s very wide! Very wide! We can’t get across! These fiery eyes and diamond pupils of old Monkey can discern good and evil up to a thousand miles during the day, and even at night, they can cover a distance of four or five hundred miles. Just now I couldn’t even see the other shore. How could I tell the width of the river?”
— Journey to the West, Chapter 47
But this ability did not grant him the power to see through illusions or discern the true nature of immortals and demons.
The misconception that the Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils could identify demons largely stems from his identification of the White Bone Spirit (White Bone Lady) during the Three Strikes Against White Bone Spirit. In reality, Sun Wukong identified demons more through commonsense judgment, intuition, observation of the environment, and logical reasoning.
When the White Bone Spirit first appeared as a young village girl, Sun Wukong didn’t “see” she was a demon with his eyes. Instead, he had already judged the surroundings as desolate and uninhabited. Recognizing the demon’s common trick, he logically concluded the girl was a monster. Later, when the spirit transformed into an elderly woman, Wukong questioned her age. Using common sense, he reasoned that firstly, an old woman shouldn’t appear in such a deserted place, and secondly, an eighty-year-old woman couldn’t have a daughter in her twenties. The third appearance as an old man was even more obviously deceitful, especially as the old man admitted being related to the previous two figures. Since Wukong had already confirmed the first two were demons, the old man essentially confessed.
Therefore, while it seemed like Sun Wukong used his Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils to recognize the White Bone Spirit, his conclusions were actually reached through logical deduction based on common sense.
Thus, the Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils function more as a symbol of supernatural power than a practical ability. Their actual effectiveness is limited and offers little concrete help to Wukong in identifying disguised beings.
Leave a Reply