On the road to the Flaming Mountain the pilgrims need a magic fan, and the fan is kept by a demon's wife whose husband is a bull. This is the Ox-demon, King Ox-head, and the whole long duel with him turns on his nature as a beast that can wear a man's shape and a man's cunning. When the Monkey, Sun, tricks the fan out of the locha Princess (one of the "wives and daughters of demons") by taking "the Ox-demon's shape", the true Ox-demon repays the theft in kind, changing "himself into the form of Pa-chieh" to steal it back. The contest escalates into a shape-shifting war: the Ox-demon becomes "a number of birds", then "tigers, leopards, bears, elephants, and an ox 10,000" feet long, laughing, "What can you do to me now?" Sun answers by growing to a hundred thousand feet, "with eyes like the sun and moon", until "the heavens and the earth shook with their onslaughts".

The served witness is the Hsi yü chi, the pilgrimage of the Monkey and his Master, carried here in a compilation of Chinese myth published 1922; Thompson's apparatus files it simply as "Werner 362." What the tale insists on is that the demon is genuinely oxen. "The Ox-demon being of so fierce and terrible a nature", both the Buddha and the Taoist Celestial Ruler must send "whole legions of celebrated warriors" to subdue him. Earlier in the same chapter another such creature, cornered by the Ancient of Days, has his strength drained by an incantation so that "he appeared as a bull, and was led away by a ring in" his nose, the god leading the monster home on a tether like a farmer with his beast. Defeat, for an ox demon, is to be haltered.

At the end the Ox-demon "was made to promise for himself and" his wife "to give up their evil ways" and follow the Buddhist precepts, the ferocity not destroyed but yoked. Only the Chinese witness is wired to served text here; the shape stands on a single tale. When a demon is an ox, is subduing it a killing or a taming?