Chinese Pantheonweapon
Ruyi Jingu Bang
- Size Manipulation
- Infinite Weight
- Indestructibility
- Owner Recognition
The magical golden-hooped staff of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. It can change size from a massive pillar to a needle small enough to hide behind an ear, weighing 17,550 pounds.
About Ruyi Jingu Bang
Compliant golden-hooped staff
In Journey to the West (sixteenth century, attributed to Wu Cheng'en), Sun Wukong takes the Ruyi Jingu Bang from the Dragon King's palace: an iron pillar that shrinks or grows, once used to gauge the ocean — the novel jokes it was Yu's measuring-rod in the flood. Weight and size-change are the book's numbers. The staff is vernacular fiction using older monkey and weapon lore, not a temple relic with a chain of custody. Wukong hides it as a needle in the ear and fights heaven with it on the road west.
Origin
Originally a pillar used by Yu the Great to measure the depths of the ocean during his legendary flood control efforts.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Journey to the West (Xiyouji), chapter of the Dragon Palace
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
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