Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils: The Eight Tribes and the Suffering of What We Cannot Have

I. The Origin of the Title

Jin Yong’s Tianlong Babu (天龍八部) takes its name from Buddhist scripture. “The Eight Tribes of Devas and Dragons” — also called the “Eight Legions” or “Aṣṭā Senā” — are a collective term for the non-human dharmapālas who attended the Buddha’s sermons. The list appears in sources such as the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, “Devadatta Chapter”) and the Yiqiejing Yinyi (a Tang-dictionary of transliterated Buddhist terms).

The standard eight are:

Deva (天) — gods of the heavenly realms
Nāga (龍) — dragon-spirits dwelling in water, lords of rain
Yakṣa (夜叉) — fierce, man-eating spirits, though some are benign
Gandharva (乾闥婆) — “fragrance spirits,” musicians of Indra’s court
Asura (阿修羅) — warlike anti-gods, perpetually battling the Devas
Garuda (迦樓羅) — golden-winged birds who prey on Nāgas
Kiṃnara (緊那羅) — singers, human-like but horned
Mahoraga (摩睺羅伽) — great serpent-spirits, sometimes depicted as human with a serpent’s head

Jin Yong himself once said: “These eight kinds of divine and demonic beings each have their own strange personalities and powers. Though they are beings beyond the human world, they share in the joys and sorrows of this dusty realm.” That sentence is, by itself, the entire theme of the novel.

The book has no single protagonist. The fates of three men — Duan Yu, Xiao Feng, and Xu Zhu — weave the warp, while the ambitions of figures like Murong Fu and You Tanzhi form the weft, together stretching a vast net in which every sentient being suffers. Buddhism names du bu de ku (求不得苦, the suffering of that which cannot be obtained) as one of the principal agonies of existence. By naming his book Tianlong Babu, Jin Yong resolves to give flesh to that single truth: in the human world, the things we most want are precisely the things we cannot have.

II. Which Tribe Is Which? A Case Jin Yong Left Open

Jin Yong never officially assigned the eight tribes to specific characters. He read his sūtras, and he wrote about the human heart; the eight tribes are a frame, not a cast list. Later readers, however, have proposed mappings. The most common and most defensible pairing is set out below as a lens for the analysis that follows.

Tribe	Common Match	The “Cannot Have” They Carry
Deva	Xiao Feng	An identity, peace between Han and Khitan, Ah Zhu’s love — none come
Nāga	Duan Yu	The “Divine Sister” / Wang Yuyan — in the end he lets go
Yakṣa	Xu Zhu	He only wants to remain a Shaolin novice, yet is forced to break every precept
Gandharva	Ah Zhu	She wants a quiet life with Xiao Feng; dies by her own skill of disguise
Asura	Murong Fu	Restoration of the Yan kingdom — ends in madness and isolation
Garuda	Kumāra (Jiumozhi)	“The greatest martial art under heaven” — and loses all his power
Kiṃnara	You Tanzhi	Ah Zi’s love — offers his eyes and his life, still receives nothing
Mahoraga	Ye Erniang / Duan Yanqing	A child / a throne — both end in the hell of their own obsession

Treat these pairings as heuristic, not definitive. Held up to the novel, they illuminate the two faces of suffering Jin Yong writes: the long reach of what we want and cannot get, and the bitter irony of what we never wanted and yet is forced into our hands.

III. What We Want and Cannot Have: The Eight Tribes’ Longing

1. Xiao Feng (Deva) — The Heaven That Could Not Bear Him

Xiao Feng is the Deva. Of all eight tribes, the Devas sit highest, most ordered, most luminous — and therefore most alone, most intolerable to a world that cannot accommodate them.

What he wants:

A complete identity. Raised among the Han as a Khitan, he grew up believing the Song to be his country. When the truth surfaces, the Han brand him an outsider, and the Khitan see him only as a weapon.
A clean revenge. He hunts the “Leading Elder,” imagining it a private vendetta, only to discover he has killed innocents and that his own benefactor has been framed.
A humble home. To graze horses with Ah Zhu beyond the Great Wall, far from the jianghu.
A court that can be trusted. The Song emperor is feckless; Emperor Yelü Hongji of the Liao only wishes to use him. The title “King of the Southern Court” is the gilded leash with which Liao finally binds him.

What he cannot have:

Between Han and Khitan there is no third road. The more righteous he is, the more both sides demand his death.
Once Ah Zhu dies, the grasslands grow impossibly far; the more Ah Zi resembles her, the deeper his pain.
When the Liao emperor offers him poisoned wine, Xiao Feng chooses to die in order to stop a war between the two nations — “Though I am a Khitan, I cannot kill a Han beneath a Khitan blade.” He ends his life at Yanmen Pass.
He dies in a thunderclap of righteousness. The Deva’s tragedy: the highest being is the one the world refuses to keep.

2. Murong Fu (Asura) — The Anti-God Who Went Mad

Murong Fu is the Asura. Asuras are by nature noble, but consumed by jealousy and rage they endlessly contest heaven and are ultimately cast down. So Murong Fu.

What he wants:

The restoration of the Yan kingdom — a four-hundred-year-old dream.
Fame in the jianghu — to awe the武林 with the “Reflecting Mirror” lineage’s art of “using the enemy’s own way against him.”
Beauty and power — Wang Yuyan loves him with abandon; he does not see her. Only at the end does the cousin realize he never loved her.
Everything Duan Yu has — and yet the fates have made Duan Yu a prince and him a remnant of a dead dynasty.

What he cannot have:

Yan is never restored. He loses the Xixia marriage contest, is defeated by Duan Yu at Shaolin, and at an inn in Dali he is maneuvered into adopting Duan Yanqing as a father.
The final image: he sits on a mound, drapes himself in imperial robes, and crowns village children as his “generals” and “ministers.” The Asura’s defeat is not that he is weaker, but that his mind has broken first.

3. Ah Zhu (Gandharva) — The Fragrance-Spirit Who Could Not Rest

Ah Zhu is the Gandharva. The Gandharvas entertain the gods with music; they have no home of their own. So Ah Zhu, a wanderer all her life, is taken from the world in the cruelest of ways.

What she wants:

An ordinary life with Xiao Feng.
To take her father’s (Duan Zhengchun’s) death upon herself — but she chooses the wrong man to impersonate.

What she cannot have:

She dies by her own greatest gift: the art of disguise. Disguised as Duan Zhengchun, she is killed by Xiao Feng’s palm.
On her deathbed she entrusts Ah Zi with Xiao Feng’s care — and does not know that Ah Zi’s love will become another hell.
She believed she had solved everyone’s problem; instead she became the largest problem of all. Every step Xiao Feng takes afterwards is dragged down by her death.

4. Duan Yu (Nāga) — The Dragon Who, in the End, Let Go

Duan Yu is the Nāga. Of all eight tribes, the dragons are the lords of water, capable of assuming any form, small or vast, hidden or manifest. Duan Yu, too, is a prince of the Dali imperial house, yet at the novel’s opening he only wants to be a carefree bookish youth. The Nāga most loves the delight of transformation; Duan Yu, the moment he steps into the jianghu, is lost in the illusion of the “Divine Sister.”

What he wants:

The “Divine Sister” within the jade statue — that is, Wang Yuyan. He travels from Dali to the Yangtze, to Xixia, for the sake of a single person.
A love untouched by power. He has no taste for the throne, no taste for martial arts, and envies no one’s fame; he only wants to be left alone.
An undisturbed home. To remain the “Crown Prince of Zhennan,” quietly reading sūtras and honouring the Buddha.

What he cannot have:

From first to last Wang Yuyan’s heart is fixed on Murong Fu. The more tender Duan Yu is, the more she feels herself a stand-in.
The jade statue he has pined for turns out to be the likeness Wuyazi carved of Li Qiushui — a mirror-image of a dead obsession. What Duan Yu has been chasing is a shadow projected by his own mind.
In the revised edition, Wang Yuyan returns to Murong Fu at the end; Duan Yu finally understands that the “dragon-daughter” he clung to for years was a phantom his own heart conjured.
The dragon can summon rain, can shrink or swell, yet is finally a creature of water. Duan Yu, for all his wandering, must at last return to “Dali,” the tank that holds him. The dragon’s sorrow is that, with all its power to change, it cannot escape its own inner sea.

5. Xu Zhu (Yakṣa) — The Gentle Fiend Who Never Asked for Any of It

Xu Zhu is the Yakṣa. Yakṣas are by nature fierce; Xu Zhu is the gentlest soul in the book. The irony is complete: a Yakṣa-body, a bodhisattva-heart.

What he wants:

To remain at Shaolin, a small novice chanting sūtras.
Never to break the precepts against killing, against lust, against wine.
A life of simplicity, regularity, harm to no one.

What he cannot have:

The Zhenlong chess game, the leadership of the Xiaoyao Sect, the seventy years of internal energy from Wuyazi, the transmission of power from Tianshan Tonglao, the marriage to the Princess of Dreams, the legacy of Li Qiushui — every single thing he actively refuses, fate forces into his arms.
In the end he is the Xixia imperial son-in-law and the master of Lingjiu Palace, and he can never return to Shaolin.
He has won “the greatest martial art under heaven” and a princess, yet everything he actually wanted is somewhere else entirely.

6. Kumāra / Jiumozhi (Garuda) — The Golden-Bird That Poisoned Itself

Jiumozhi is the Garuda. The golden-winged birds feed on dragons, and die of the dragons’ poison. So Jiumozhi.

What he wants:

To learn every martial art under heaven, to sit upon the throne of “the greatest in the world.”
To awe the Central Plains with Shaolin’s seventy-two techniques.

What he cannot have:

The Yijin Jing he stole is a forgery; forced training of the seventy-two techniques ruptures his meridians.
At the bottom of a dry well Duan Yu drains all of his power; a once-mighty hierarch is reduced to a husk.
And yet precisely because he has lost everything, he wakes up. In the end he returns to Tibet, takes the tonsure again, and resumes the bearing of a true elder.
The Golden-Bird at last understands: he who devours the dragon is poisoned by the dragon; only by laying down the knife can one become a Buddha.

7. You Tanzhi (Kiṃnara) — The Singer Whom No One Heard

You Tanzhi is the Kiṃnara. The Kiṃnaras are renowned for song, yet they are horned, neither man nor spirit. You Tanzhi is the image of a thing half human, half ghost.

What he wants:

For Ah Zi to look at him once.
Even to be used, humiliated, fed poison as a test-subject.

What he cannot have:

From first to last Ah Zi loves only Xiao Feng. In her eyes You Tanzhi is a tool, something to be thrown away at will.
He gives his two eyes to forge the Icy-Cicada poison palm, in exchange for one brief smile from Ah Zi. In the end Ah Zi hurls herself off the cliff with Xiao Feng’s body; he throws himself after her.
The singer’s sorrow is this: however beautifully he sings, the listener is always someone else.

8. Duan Yanqing & Ye Erniang (Mahoraga) — The Serpents That Cannot Uncoil

The Mahoraga is the great serpent-spirit, wound tight in obsession, slow to leave the cycle. In the novel, the two most deeply entangled are Duan Yanqing and Ye Erniang.

Duan Yanqing — once the Crown Prince of Dali, broken in body by treacherous ministers, maimed and disfigured, surviving on ventriloquism and an iron staff. For the rest of his life his single obsession is “to take back the throne.” At the climax he compels Duan Yu to acknowledge him, and he compels Murong Fu to do the same. When Duan Yu finally calls him “father,” he turns and drifts away. The instant he obtains what he wanted, none of it matters anymore.
Ye Erniang — her child was stolen at birth. She retaliates by stealing other women’s infants and killing them. When she learns that Xu Zhu is her son, she flings her arms around him, calls out once “My son!” — and kills herself. The “child” she had wanted all her life comes, and with him comes her death.

The two of them are the “serpents of obsession,” coiled around a single lifetime.

IV. What We Never Wanted but Are Given Anyway: The Irony of Fate

Jin Yong’s mastery lies not only in writing the suffering of longing, but also in the absurdity of obtaining. Some things you push away and they will not leave; some things you never asked for and fate forces them into your hands.

1. Xu Zhu: A Monk Who Did Not Want to Leave the Monastery, Forced to Be the Greatest

Xu Zhu wanted only to remain a monk. He got:

the breaking of the precept against lust (with the Princess of Dreams in the Xixia ice-cellar);
the breaking of the precept against killing (when he inadvertently killed Xiaoyao experts);
the breaking of the precepts against wine and against meat;
the inheritance of three lineages’ worth of power — Xiaoyao, Tianshan Tonglao, Li Qiushui;
the lordship of Lingjiu Palace and the hand of the Xixia princess.

The simpler he wished to be, the more complicated the world insisted on making him. Xu Zhu’s tragedy is the tragedy of passive success.

2. Duan Yu: He Who Sought the “Divine Sister” Found Only a Mirror

Duan Yu is obsessed with the “Divine Sister” — the jade statue that is, in fact, a shadow of Wang Yuyan. He does not love Wang Yuyan; he loves the projection of his own longing.

At last he and Wang Yuyan are together, and then (in the revised edition) she returns to Murong Fu — and Duan Yu is, paradoxically, “released.”
His true father is Duan Yanqing, the leader of the Four Evils; his mother is Dao Baifeng, who once lay with Duan Yanqing out of vengeance.
The Wang Yuyan he wanted leaves him; the throne, the patricidal burden, the lineage he never asked for — all of it is his.

3. Xiao Feng: A Man Who Refused to Be Khitan, Crowned “King of the Southern Court”

Xiao Feng did not wish to be a Khitan; once his identity is revealed he refuses to march south against the Song. In the end, the Liao emperor still names him King of the Southern Court. The very title he most detests is the one with which Liao shackles him.

4. Jiumozhi: A Man Who Never Wished to Lose, Who Lost Everything — and Was Saved

Jiumozhi lives to win; in the end he loses all his power. Yet it is precisely in that losing that he finds himself again. He receives the “losing” he never wanted; he loses the martial art by which he was possessed — and he is the only character in the novel who is truly saved.

5. Ah Zi: She Who Wanted Xiao Feng’s Love, Received Only a Deathbed Bequest

Ah Zi spends the whole book trying to steal her sister’s man. At the end Xiao Feng dies, and his dying wish is “take care of Ah Zi” — but he never loved her. She flings herself off the cliff with his body. She obtains what she wished for, and by obtaining it proves that she never had it.

6. Murong Bo and Xiao Yuanshan: Two Old Men Who Did Not Wish to Die but Faked Death for Thirty Years

Both old men hide out in Shaolin for thirty years, and are finally awakened by the Sweeping Monk and take refuge in the dharma. What they had sought was “revenge.” What thirty years of stolen life gave them, in the end, was “letting go.”

V. Through the Buddha’s Eye: The Eight Tribes All Suffer

The Sūtra of the Eight Awakenings of the Great Beings (八大人覺經) says: “The world is impermanent; the country is fragile. Birth and death are grave matters; impermanence comes swiftly.” The whole of Tianlong Babu is that single sentence, dramatized.

Deva (Xiao Feng) dies in unyielding righteousness,
Nāga (Duan Yu) is freed by the breaking of illusion,
Yakṣa (Xu Zhu) learns to bear what is given,
Gandharva (Ah Zhu) is trapped by love,
Asura (Murong Fu) is destroyed in madness,
Garuda (Jiumozhi) empties the self by emptying self,
Kiṃnara (You Tanzhi) sacrifices body for feeling,
Mahoraga (Duan Yanqing, Ye Erniang) enter the hell of obsession.

Jin Yong is not writing one person’s story. He is writing the countenance of all sentient beings, who suffer because they cannot have.

The most piercing line in the book belongs to the Sweeping Monk:

“The internal cultivation of a Buddhist disciple has its root in cutting off the seven emotions and six desires. A practitioner of qi who does not restrain the appetites and stirs up greed, anger, and delusion will find his martial art diminished.”

And the deepest cunning of Tianlong Babu lies in making the reader see: none of the Eight Tribes truly cut off the seven emotions and the six desires. Every figure in it tumbles between the desire to obtain and the unwilling acceptance of loss.

VI. Conclusion: The Substance of Tragedy Is the Human

On the surface Tianlong Babu is about gods and demons; at its heart it is about people.

Xiao Feng’s tragedy is that he is a person — he cannot reduce himself to any single tribe.
Murong Fu’s tragedy is that he is not a person — he knows only the ancestors, never the present.
Duan Yu’s tragedy turns into grace when he finally learns to be a person — to love, and to release.
Xu Zhu’s tragedy is that he wishes to be a person — a Buddhist disciple — and the world will not leave him one.

To want and be unable to obtain is obsession; to obtain without wanting is fate. Where obsession and fate intertwine, tragedy is born.

What Jin Yong, by way of the title Tianlong Babu, finally wishes to tell the reader is this:

All the world’s affairs resemble the countenances of the Eight Tribes — apparently possessed of divine powers, in truth revolving inside the cycle. Only when one truly sees through “what cannot be obtained” and “what cannot be helped being lost” can one stand, at Yanmen Pass, in the ancient Xixia palace, on the roof of Lingjiu Palace, with a little less regret.

Appendix: Suggested Sub-Titles

“The Eight Tribes All Suffer; the World Is Impermanent — Tianlong Babu on Wanting and Not-Obtaining”
“Tianlong Babu: Every Person Imprisoned in His Own Obsession”
“From Xiao Feng to Murong Fu: The Eight Tribes’ Unobtainable in the Hands of Jin Yong”

This essay reads the Tianlong Babu in both the Joint Publishing (Sanlian) and Century New-Revised editions, and draws on Jin Yong’s several public statements on the novel. The tribe-to-character mappings used here are among the most commonly held readings; Jin Yong himself never officially assigned them.