Does Yuan Shoucheng really exist?

The main line of the Journey to the West is that the four men and women go to the Western Heaven to learn Buddhist scriptures, but what is the reason for learning Buddhist scriptures? This involves an important plot: King Jinghe was beheaded for violating the dogma, and the contradiction with Li Shimin intensified, resulting in the story that Li Shimin asked Tang Priest to handle affairs and Guanyin Bodhisattva chose Tang Priest to learn from the scriptures.

However, if you think about it carefully, King Jinghe was beheaded because he was angry with a mortal and deliberately violated the jade emperor's rain decree. This mortal is Yuan Shoucheng. He not only clarified the jade emperor's will, but also hit the identity of King Jinghe. He is just a mortal. Why is he so powerful?

In history, Yuan Shoucheng's identity is not simple. He is the uncle of Yuan Tiangang, a famous metaphysicist in the early Tang Dynasty. Everyone in Yuan Tiangang has heard of him. He is a god-like figure who can pinch and calculate. Together with his apprentice Li, he wrote a TuiBei Map, which predicted what would happen two thousand years later.

Of course, "Tui Bei Tu" is purely a theory attached by the ancients. There can't be such a magical person in history, but at least in ancient legends, Yuan Tiangang is a living immortal. So when Wu Cheng'en wrote The Journey to the West, he also wrote Yuan Shoucheng as an invincible fortune teller, which promoted the development of the plot later. However, when people later interpreted The Journey to the West, they thought that things were not that simple.

First of all, what makes Yuan Shoucheng so accurate? The Jade Emperor is not an ordinary person. How can Yuan Shoucheng know what kind of imperial edict the Jade Emperor will make? So there is a saying that Yuan Shoucheng is actually the incarnation of the Jade Emperor.

But it doesn't make sense. Why did the Jade Emperor kill King Jinghe? This is not good for him, so there is another saying that Yuan Shoucheng is the incarnation of Tathagata or Guanyin Bodhisattva. They did this because everything behind them was arranged. Buddhism calculated to kill King Jinghe, then let Li Shimin suffer, and then led to Xuanzang, so that Xuanzang and Li Shimin became brothers, so that Xuanzang could take advantage of the national prestige of the Tang Dynasty and suffer as little as possible on the way of learning from Western learning. After all, at that time, the reputation of the Tang Dynasty spread far and wide, and countries in the western regions surrendered in succession. As long as there are credentials of the Tang Dynasty, ordinary small countries will be treated with courtesy.

Because the Tang Dynasty was Li, it respected Taoism very much (Taoism took the second child as its ancestor), and then Buddhism carefully planned such a story to rob this site, kill King Jinghe, and then use it to serve the Tang Priest and make Buddhism flourish in the Central Plains. In this way, it makes sense to say that Yuan Shoucheng is the incarnation of Tathagata or Avalokitesvara.

However, as far as I am concerned, in fact, these are all over-interpreted by future generations. Just like we do Chinese reading comprehension when reading, it is obvious that many times the author doesn't mean it at all, so we have to interpret it. In fact, Wu Cheng'en just wanted to make an excuse for Xuanzang and Li Shimin to become sworn brothers, so he arranged such a role casually. Then after that, the role was useless and never appeared again.