Zhu Bajie - Character

Character

Zhu Bajie originally held the title of Tiānpéng Yuánshuài (天蓬元帅; lit. "Marshal Canopy"), commander-in-chief of 80,000 Heavenly Navy Soldiers. He was later banished, however, for misbehaviour. At a party organized for all the significant figures in Heaven, Bajie saw the Goddess of the Moon for the first time and was captivated by her beauty. Following a drunken attempt to sexually harass her, she reported this to the Jade Emperor and thus he was banished to Earth. In popular retellings, Zhu Bajie was sentenced to a thousand lives where each life would end in a love tragedy. In some retellings of the story, his banishment is linked to Sun Wukong's downfall. In any case, he was exiled from Heaven and sent to be reincarnated on Earth, where by mishap he fell into a pig well and was reborn as a man-eating pig-monster known as Zhū Gāngliè (the "strong-maned pig").

In the earlier portions of Journey to the West, Wukong and Xuanzang come to Gao village and find that a daughter of the village elder had been kidnapped and the abductor left a note demanding marriage. In some versions of the story Bajie has convinced the elder to allow him to marry the daughter based on his ability to do large amounts of hard work due to his prodigious strength. The elder recants when he discovers that although Zhu Bajie manages to do quite a lot of work in the fields he manages to eat so much that the farm is losing money anyway. After some investigations, Wukong found out that Bajie was the "villain" behind this. He fought with Wukong, but ended the fight when he learned that Wukong was a disciple of Xuanzang, and that he had also been recruited by Guanyin to join their pilgrimage and make atonements for his past sins.

At the end of the novel, most of Bajie's fellow pilgrims achieve enlightenment and become buddhas or arhats, but he does not; although much improved, he is still too much a creature of his base desires. He is instead rewarded for his part in the pilgrimage's success with a job as "Cleanser of the Altars" and all the leftovers he can eat. However, his actual rank in relation to the others is unclear.

As a weapon, he wields a jiǔchǐ-dīngpá, a nine-tooth (jiǔchǐ) iron muck-rake (dīngpá) from Heaven that weighs roughly 5,048 kilos (or roughly 11,129 pounds).