Kunpeng

Once Kunpeng had taken human shape he travelled the world, heard that Hongjun Daozu had opened his seat at Zixiao Palace, and set out to attend, hoping to deepen his own attainment.

When Kunpeng reached Zixiao Palace, the six mats before the hall had already been taken in turn by the Three Pure Ones, Nüwa, Hongyun and himself, with the other listeners ranged behind, waiting for Hongjun to begin.

When Jieyin and Zhunti arrived from the west the six seats were full. Seeing that they had come a long way, Hongyun rose and gave up his own mat; Zhunti then took the chance to say that Kunpeng, being furred and horned, had no business in the front rank.

Yuanshi and others pressed him too. With nobody to speak for him, Kunpeng had to leave his mat. Jieyin sat down at once, and Kunpeng withdrew to the back to go on listening — laying the grudge for his lost seat at the door of Hongyun and the two of the west.

The common accounts say Kunpeng held this against Hongyun, Jieyin and Zhunti afterwards, and that he clashed repeatedly with Hongyun’s side across the world; but the versions differ in detail and there is no settled account of what passed between them.

When the sermons ended Kunpeng left Zixiao Palace and returned to the world below. At that time Dijun and Donghuang Taiyi were taking shape within the solar star, meaning to gather the demon hosts into a clan of their own.

When Dijun and Taiyi founded the Yao Heavenly Court, Kunpeng’s attainment and seniority earned him the title of preceptor, with charge of leading and training the demon hosts, and a hall of his own in the Heavenly Court: the Preceptor’s Palace.

From the Preceptor’s Palace Kunpeng oversaw the training of newly joined demons in the arts of transformation and in drill, and any Yao campaign or movement was usually planned through him first and then submitted to Dijun and Taiyi for decision.

In the first years of the Heavenly Court, Kunpeng travelled between the demon settlements of the four quarters, settled the newly joined peoples and judged the quarrels between them; the Preceptor’s Palace became the most important place in the Heavenly Court after the seats of Dijun and Taiyi.

The Twelve Ancestral Witches harried the borders of the Heavenly Court again and again, and Kunpeng was ordered to garrison the crucial points with the best of his own troops. He fought several small engagements against Wu detachments, winning some and losing others, and the border country changed hands repeatedly.

When the Wu–Yao war broke out in full, Kunpeng entered the Zhou-Heaven Star Formation with Dijun and Donghuang Taiyi and held one wing of it with his generals against the assault of the Twelve Capital Gods and Demons Formation.

Several times in the fighting Kunpeng drove his people into the Wu lines and closed with the generals of the Ancestral Witches, and more than once was nearly trapped, escaping each time by taking now the fish and now the bird shape.

When Dijun and Donghuang Taiyi had both fallen in the formation and the Zhou-Heaven Star Formation collapsed, Kunpeng saw that the battle could not be saved, left his station and fled towards the northern sea.

Many Honghuang novels have Kunpeng carry off the Hetu and Luoshu as he withdrew, with Nüwa or another great power recovering them later and giving them to the reborn Fuxi to work the eight trigrams from; other versions have the books simply scatter into the human world. Their fate is not settled.

When the Wu–Yao war ended, Kunpeng did not try to rebuild the old order of the Heavenly Court. He led what was left of his people south, withdrew at last into the depths of the northern sea, resumed his true form as the giant Kun, and lay hidden in the deep water.

After that Kunpeng was seldom seen in the world. The site of the Preceptor’s Palace fell into ruin, and only the occasional report of something huge moving in the northern waters was taken by later tellers as a sign that he was still there.