Cold-Dispelling King

The Lantern Festival in Jinjingfu is the biggest night of the year. The streets blaze with lantern light, the people pour out of the city, and the temples set up hundreds of golden lamps - each burning soy-scented oil worth two taels of silver a jin, more than 14,000 jin a year. It happens every year. Why? Because when Lantern Night comes, three Buddha images drift down from the sky, shining with golden light and auspicious vapor. They hover above the lamps, "collect the lamp oil," and float away. The whole city bows low in worship, certain that this is the Buddha's miracle. Who would doubt the Buddha?

No one doubted it for many years. Then Tripitaka and his disciples passed through Jinjingfu, and Sun Wukong saw through the true nature of the three "Buddhas": they were three rhinoceros spirits. Cold-Dispelling King, Heat-Dispelling King, and Dust-Dispelling King - the three brothers from Black-Blue Cave on Green Dragon Mountain - had been putting on this show over Jinjingfu for who knows how long. It is one of the cleverest scams in the novel: not robbery by force, but robbery through faith. By taking Buddha's form, the three rhinoceroses turn the people's devotion into a yearly supply of lamp oil. Zero cost, more than 14,000 jin in profit. A business like that has a margin far beyond anything a road robber could dream of.

The three rhinoceroses of Black-Blue Cave: the oil scam run by fake Buddhas

Cold-Dispelling King is the eldest brother and the mastermind of the whole plot. He lives in Black-Blue Cave with Heat-Dispelling King and Dust-Dispelling King, and each of them has a pair of rhinoceros horns - horns that will later become the key props of the story.

The division of labor is simple. Every Lantern Festival the three brothers use sorcery to turn themselves into three Buddhas and ride the clouds over Jinjingfu. Their transformation is excellent - not only are the forms convincing, they can also release golden light and auspicious vapor, creating a perfect picture of "Buddha light covering the land." In an age when ordinary people could not tell real Buddha light from fake, the disguise is almost unbreakable.

Chapter 91 lays out the economic scale of the scam. The soy-scented lamp oil prepared each year for the Buddha's miracle comes to more than 14,000 jin. By the standards of the day, that is an immense cost. The whole city spends itself year after year on this oil, treating it as a supreme act of devotion. The three rhinoceros spirits enjoy the fruit of it without lifting a finger - no battles, no risks, just one Lantern Festival flight each year and the oil arrives by itself.

Wu Cheng'en is not just telling a demon story here. He is writing an allegory of faith economics. The people of Jinjingfu are not stupid - they are devout. Devotion itself is not the mistake. The mistake is that no one bothers to verify whether the Buddhas in the sky are real. Once faith becomes something you are not allowed to question, the fraudster gains infinite room to work. The rhinoceros spirits are not exploiting ignorance alone; they are exploiting belief. That is far more dangerous, because belief is harder to break than ignorance.

Cold-Dispelling King fights well enough in close combat, carrying a halberd-axe. But his true strength is strategic. He chooses a way to take resources without open war - a way to defeat people without ever touching them. Most demons in Journey to the West survive by robbery. Cold-Dispelling King survives by fraud: he puts on Buddha's clothing and lets the victims hand over the money willingly. The first method is risky. The second is almost risk-free - until Sun Wukong arrives.

Jinjingfu's lamp-oil scam: more than 14,000 jin a year

Why lamp oil? Why not gold or treasure?

Because the rhinoceros spirits understand their own symbolic value. In Chinese myth, rhinoceros horn is associated with driving away evil. Soy-scented lamp oil is an especially precious temple offering, made of oils and perfumes and burned as the highest-grade fuel for sacred lamps. To the rhinoceros spirits, that oil probably has a cultivation value comparable to ginseng fruit for other demons.

The 14,000-plus jin figure in chapter 91 is not random. Converted into silver, that oil would support a small city. Yet Jinjingfu keeps paying year after year because it believes the oil is a merit-making offering to the Buddha. The people would rather go without themselves than save money on the Buddha lamps.

This kind of faith tax is not exotic in Chinese history. In the Ming dynasty of Wu Cheng'en's own time, Daoism flourished, the emperor himself pursued immortality, and temples and monasteries often consumed vast amounts of common wealth. The Jinjingfu lamp-oil scam is therefore not just a demon story; it is Wu Cheng'en's pointed metaphor for "using religion as a cover for plunder." Three rhinoceroses dressed as Buddhas - that alone is a brutal satire.

When Wukong exposes the scam and smashes the "Buddha statues," the people of Jinjingfu are not grateful at first. They are shocked and afraid. Their belief system has been shattered. A "Buddha" they have trusted for years turns out to be a rhinoceros spirit - a blow no less shocking than being told the sun rises in the west. Wukong has not only subdued demons; he has destroyed the spiritual pillar of a city. The price of the rescue is faith collapse.

Four Wood-Bird Stars: Horn Wood Dragon, Dipper Wood Spleen, Hairy Wood Wolf, Neck Wood Dog

The three rhinoceros spirits also seize Tripitaka. At the end of chapter 91, Cold-Dispelling King takes Tripitaka back to Black-Blue Cave in the chaos. Eating Tripitaka's flesh is not their main goal, but once the monk lands in their hands, why not?

Wukong cannot handle the trio alone. He goes up to heaven for help and summons the Four Wood-Bird Stars from the Twenty-Eight Lodges - Horn Wood Dragon, Dipper Wood Spleen, Hairy Wood Wolf, and Neck Wood Dog. Why these four? Because rhinoceroses belong to the beasts of the earth, while the Wood stars in the lodges govern beasts by nature. The Four Wood-Bird Stars are a natural counter to ground-beast demons. This is one of the novel's rare moments of precision deployment by five-phase correspondences - not just "send a few heavenly troops," but bring the demon's actual natural enemy.

The battle of chapter 92 becomes a hunt. The Four Wood-Bird Stars revert to their true forms - dragon, qilin-like beast, wolf, and dog - and attack in those forms, while Prince Moang and his water troops block the escape route by sea. The three rhinoceros spirits are caught in a pincer and break apart.

Cold-Dispelling King is the last of the three to be taken down. He relies on his halberd-axe and brute force to hold out, but under the joint pressure of the stars and the dragon troops he finally falls. All three rhinoceros spirits are killed - not redeemed, not carried back to heaven, just killed.

That ending is not common in Journey to the West. Most demons with a background are eventually reclaimed by their owners - the green lion returns to Manjusri, the white elephant to Samantabhadra, the Nine-Ling Spirit returns to Taishang Laojun. But the three rhinoceros spirits have no heavenly sponsor. No one comes to claim them. Their fate is the simplest and harshest of all: death.

Rhino horns offered to the Jade Emperor: the political economy of demon corpses

The story does not end with the killing. At the close of chapter 92, a detail easy to miss appears: the rhinoceros horns are sawn off, some offered to the Jade Emperor and the rest divided among the heavenly warriors who fought.

Rhino horn was an extremely valuable material in ancient China - medicine, talisman, ritual implement. The three rhinoceroses had six horns in total, all the refined essence of years of cultivation. Those horns are sawn from the corpses and turned into trophies and tribute.

What makes this chilling is the way the bodies are turned into objects. A living demon - even a fraud, even a villain - is killed and then broken down into usable parts. That is not far from the way human hunters once slaughtered rhinoceroses for their horns. Wu Cheng'en blurs the line between demon-slaying and animal slaughter. Once the demon is dead, the body is no longer treated as a life that once existed. It becomes a pile of resources to be distributed.

No one in the story objects. No one is uneasy. The Four Wood-Bird Stars and the dragon troops share out the horns and report them to heaven; everyone is pleased. But if you place that scene beside the years of lamp-oil fraud, the irony is perfect. While alive, Cold-Dispelling King cheats the people by pretending to be Buddha. After death, his body is casually divided up by heaven. Alive, he is a parasite. Dead, he becomes prey. In the power ladder of Journey to the West, every level feeds on the one below it: the people are cheated by demons, the demons are killed by heaven, and heaven itself takes material from the dead demons to present upward. The food chain is ice-cold and complete.

Related Figures

• Heat-Dispelling King - the younger brother, bitten to death by the star gods
• Dust-Dispelling King - the youngest brother, captured by nose-piercing and executed
• Sun Wukong - the main opponent, who sees through the fake Buddha scam and summons the Four Wood-Bird Stars
• Tripitaka - seized by the three rhinoceros spirits and taken into Black-Blue Cave
• Four Wood-Bird Stars - Horn Wood Dragon, Dipper Wood Spleen, Hairy Wood Wolf, and Neck Wood Dog, who hunt the rhinoceros spirits
• Prince Moang - the West Sea Dragon King's son, who leads water troops to block the escape route
• Jade Emperor - the supreme ruler who receives the horns as tribute