Vanity

Reputation Gu’s fame for Verdant Great Sun spreads word of his drinking, and a band of Tiger-Striped Honey Bees confronts him, their hive in tow, to make him judge whose brew is finer, theirs or the four heaven and earth monkeys’. Too weak to refuse the powerful bees, he tastes their honey wine, sweet without excess and richly fragrant, and calls it enough to make a man the most fortunate in the world. Asked directly which wine wins, he answers drunkenly that both have their own merits, and the insulted bees move to attack. He vanishes first. Lost in drink for seven days and nights, he wakes bound and carried by Hairy Men toward a cauldron, taken as the human catalyst for an eternal Gu they believe will finally succeed with him as its sacrifice. A voice in his mind, divine travel Gu, explains that it is born whenever someone drinks four different top wines and can send him anywhere, though only while he is drunk. It answers that his own drunken use of its power stranded him, and that one harm and one rescue leave them even. ^{ch. 357}

Verdant Great Sun turns pale and struggles, but the Hairy Men are unmoved. Thrown into the cauldron, he watches them add agates, red pepper and a small fox that dissolves into blue smoke as the liquid reddens and boils. They add vanity Gu, a hollow-shelled Gu shaped like a huge crab, who is thrilled to meet the famous Verdant Great Sun and begs to know how he became so admired even as they are both about to die. Verdant Great Sun rebukes him for asking at such a moment, and vanity Gu, taking the scolding itself as the answer, concludes that enduring the heat is the price of popularity. Thanking him, vanity Gu bursts in a soft explosion. The blast spreads a formless poison into the hearts of every Hairy Man present, turning their eyes red. ^{ch. 357}

Poisoned with vanity, the Hairy Men take the bait when Verdant Great Sun claims his own hair, blazing since the Vajra Monkeys’ wine, outshines anything on their bodies even with eternal life ahead of them. One after another they set themselves alight to match him, burning in agony while showing off the fire, too late to put it out. He escapes in the chaos. Divine travel Gu praises the trick. Verdant Great Sun answers that the cleverness was not his, and that vanity in people trades real goals for a false beauty and endures pain to get it. ^{ch. 357}