Sun Wukong, the Monkey King

Sun Wukong (孙悟空), the Monkey King, is one of the main characters of Journey to the West (西游记), a Chinese novel published in the 16th century under the Ming dynasty (明朝, 1368–1644). The oldest edition that survives was printed in Nanjing (南京) in 1592 and is known as the Shidetang edition (世德堂本). Two earlier editions were published between 1522 and 1566, but no copy of either has survived.

The novel runs to 100 chapters and falls into three parts:

• the first seven chapters tell how a monkey is born from a stone egg and gains magic powers;

• five chapters introduce the monk Xuanzang, known as Tripitaka, and explain how his mission to the Western Paradise came about;

• the rest of the book follows the 81 adventures of Tripitaka and his three companions, all animal spirits, on the road to India, until they obtain the sacred scriptures.

That monk really existed. The historical Xuanzang (玄奘) travelled to India in the 7th century, and the novel keeps the broad outline of his journey while filling it with folk tales and invention. The author is a harder question than it looks: the name printed on every edition today, Wu Cheng'en, is an attribution made long after the book first appeared.

Wu Cheng'en (吴承恩) was a scholar and poet born around 1500 or 1505, depending on the source, in Huai'an (淮安), in today's Jiangsu province, who died around 1582. Encyclopedias present him as the author of the novel, but the attribution has long been argued over.

The book came out anonymously. No Ming edition names an author: the 1592 printing only says it was revised by a "Master of the Huayang Cave-Heaven" (华阳洞天主人), and its preface, by Chen Yuanzhi (陈元之), says that nobody knows who wrote it. Under the Qing dynasty (清朝), Taoists credited it to Qiu Chuji (丘处机), a Taoist master of the Southern Song period.

In the early 20th century, the scholar Hu Shi (胡适) and his students put forward Wu Cheng'en instead. Their main evidence was a local gazetteer of Huai'an dated 1625, which lists a "Xiyou ji" among Wu's works.

The objections are serious:

• the gazetteer does not say what kind of work this "Xiyou ji" was, and nothing shows it was a novel;

• Wu never mentions the book in any of his other writings;

• in the early Qing, the bibliographer Huang Yuji (黄虞稷) filed Wu's "Xiyou ji" under geography, which points rather to a travel account.

As the scholar Anthony C. Yu put it, the dispute has swung back and forth for nearly a century without being settled. Wu Cheng'en is the traditional attribution, not a proven one.

The monk of the novel is based on Xuanzang (玄奘), a Chinese Buddhist monk who died in 664. Troubled by contradictions he found in the sacred texts, he decided to study Buddhism at its source, in India. In 629 he slipped out of Chang'an (长安), the capital of the Tang dynasty (唐朝), in breach of an official ban on travelling west without permission.

His route ran north of the Taklamakan Desert, through the oasis towns of Turfan, Karashar and Kucha, then Tashkent and Samarkand, beyond the Iron Gates into Bactria and over the Hindu Kush into northwest India. He reached the Ganges region in 633 and spent most of his stay at the monastery of Nalanda, a great centre of Buddhist learning, where he perfected his Sanskrit and his knowledge of Buddhist philosophy.

He came back to Chang'an in 645, after sixteen years away, with 657 Buddhist texts packed in 520 cases. He managed to translate only a small part of them, about 75 texts in more than 1,300 chapters, including some of the most important Mahayana scriptures. He also left an account of the countries he had passed through, the Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang (大唐西域记).

The novel calls him Tang Sanzang (唐三藏), "the Tripitaka Master of Tang": the Tripitaka is the Buddhist canon, and the word is also used as an honorific for some monks.

For centuries, storytellers embroidered Xuanzang's journey. In northern China and the Western Regions, folk tales already gave the monk a monkey guardian; according to one scholar, this tradition shaped the pilgrimage chapters of the novel, where Sun Wukong is often called "the Pilgrim" (行者).

The oldest surviving work of fiction about the journey is The Story of How Tripitaka of the Great Tang Fetched the Scriptures (大唐三藏取经诗话). It is usually dated to the Song dynasty, though the exact date is debated, and it draws heavily on stories from the late Tang and the Five Dynasties. It survives in two old printed copies kept in Japan, which only became known in the early 20th century. The monkey is already there: the "Monkey Pilgrim" (猴行者) looks like a scholar dressed in white, comes from the Purple Cloud Cave on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, and calls himself king of 84,000 bronze-headed, iron-browed macaques. A precursor of Sha Wujing appears too.

A play in 24 acts from the late Yuan or early Ming, generally attributed to Yang Jingxian (杨景贤), already contains many episodes of the later novel: the monkey steals the peaches of immortality from Heaven and ends up imprisoned under a mountain, he is punished with a restricting headband, Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing are subdued, a dragon is turned into a white horse, and the pilgrims pass the Fire Mountain and the Country of Women.

So when the 100-chapter novel appeared, the story had long lived on in colloquial tales, a short poetic narrative, and on the stage.

Sun Wukong is born on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit (花果山). An ancient rock, created by the union of Heaven and Earth and steeped in the essence of the sun and moon, produces a stone egg; touched by the wind, the egg turns into a stone monkey. He makes his name by bravely leaping through a waterfall and discovering what lies behind it, the Water Curtain Cave (水帘洞). For this feat the monkeys make him their king, and he takes the title "Handsome Monkey King" (美猴王).

In search of immortality, he goes to study with the Patriarch Subhuti (须菩提祖师), in the Cave of the Slanting Moon and Three Stars on Lingtai Fangcun Mountain. This master gives him the name Sun Wukong. The character is thought to derive from Subhuti, one of the Buddha's ten principal disciples, but the powers he passes on come from Taoist practices:

• the 72 transformations (七十二变), which let Sun Wukong change into animals and objects;

• the cloud somersault (筋斗云), which carries him 108,000 li (about 54,000 km) in a single leap.

He still needs a weapon. In chapter 3 he visits the underwater palace of Ao Guang (敖广), Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. There lies an iron pillar that Yu the Great (大禹) once used to measure the depth of the waters while taming the floods, now popularly known as the "pillar that holds down the sea" (定海神针). This is the Ruyi Jingu Bang (如意金箍棒): black iron with a gold band at each end, marked with a weight of 13,500 jin. It changes size at its owner's will; Sun Wukong shrinks it to a needle and keeps it in his ear.

Chapters 4 to 7 tell the episode the novel calls havoc in the heavenly palace (大闹天宫). To keep the monkey quiet, the Jade Emperor (玉帝) summons him to Heaven and makes him bimawen (弼马温), keeper of the heavenly horses. Learning that the post has no rank at all, he overturns the desk and storms home, where two demon kings suggest a grander title for his banner: Great Sage Equal to Heaven (齐天大圣). After its troops are beaten, Heaven takes the advice of Taibai Jinxing (太白金星), the spirit of the planet Venus: grant the title, with no duties and no salary.

Left idle, he is given the Queen Mother of the West's peach garden, whose fruit ripens in 3,000, 6,000 or 9,000 years and grants immortality; he eats the peaches. Not invited to the Peach Banquet (蟠桃会), he gorges on its food and wine, stumbles drunk into the palace of Laozi (太上老君), swallows five gourds of elixir pills and flees home.

A hundred thousand heavenly soldiers cannot take him; at last the god Erlang (二郎神), called in on the advice of Guanyin (观音), fights him, and a ring thrown by Laozi knocks him down. Since blades and thunderbolts cannot hurt him, Laozi shuts him in his Eight Trigrams Furnace (八卦炉) for 49 days. He survives in the corner of the wind trigram, and the smoke leaves him with "fiery eyes and golden pupils" (火眼金睛).

He breaks out and wrecks Heaven until the Buddha (如来) is called in. The wager: if the monkey can leap out of the Buddha's right palm, Heaven is his. He flies to five flesh-coloured pillars he takes for the end of the world, writes on one of them and returns, only to find his words on the Buddha's finger. The Buddha turns his five fingers into the Five Elements Mountain (五行山) and pins him beneath it for 500 years, fed on iron pellets and molten copper.

In chapter 8 the Buddha wants to send his scriptures to the East and asks who will go and find a pilgrim to fetch them. Guanyin (观音), the bodhisattva of compassion, volunteers. Among the treasures he gives her are three tightening headbands (紧箍儿), each with its own spell, meant for any powerful demon who becomes the pilgrim's disciple but will not obey. On her way east she recruits the future escort: Sha Wujing (沙悟净), a river monster; a monster reborn by mistake in a sow's womb, whom she names Zhu Wuneng and the monk will later call Zhu Bajie (猪八戒); a condemned dragon prince; and finally the monkey, trapped under the mountain for more than 500 years, who promises to mend his ways.

In chapter 14 the monk Tang Sanzang peels the Buddha's seal off the mountain and sets him free. Soon after, the monkey kills six bandits and, when scolded, walks off. Guanyin, disguised as an old woman, gives the monk a cap and a spell, the "Tightening-Headband Spell" (紧箍咒). As soon as the monkey tries on the cap, a golden band takes root around his head, and whenever the monk recites the spell his head aches unbearably. In chapter 15 a dragon swallows the monk's white horse; Guanyin turns the dragon into a horse of the same colour, which carries the pilgrim for the rest of the journey.

The road to India then brings ordeal after ordeal. Near the end, Guanyin reads the register of the monk's misfortunes, counts 80 and orders one more, because in the Buddha's way "nine times nine" leads back to the truth: these are the 81 tribulations (九九八十一难). In the last chapter Sun Wukong becomes the "Victorious Fighting Buddha" (斗战胜佛), and the band is gone from his head.

Britannica sums up the novel's appeal: its comedy and adventure, its biting satire of society and bureaucracy, and its allegory of human striving and perseverance. In his 1923 study of the novel, the scholar Hu Shi even read the havoc in Heaven as a revolution against a useless Jade Emperor and a "dark, corrupt" Heaven.

Where does the monkey come from? Hu Shi wrote that he "always suspected that this monkey of vast magic powers was not a home product but an import from India": in Hanuman, the monkey general of the Indian epic Ramayana, he saw the outline of the Great Sage. The writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) disagreed. In a 1924 lecture he pointed out that the Indian texts translated into Chinese contained nothing similar, while the author knew Tang-dynasty tales well; he saw the model instead in Wuzhiqi (无支祁), an ape-like water spirit that a Tang tale shows chained at the foot of a mountain on the orders of Yu the Great. The Ramayana was only translated into Chinese in the 20th century, and the question is still debated.

The monkey has long since left the book:

• Havoc in Heaven (大闹天宫), an animated feature by Wan Laiming (万籁鸣), made in two parts between 1961 and 1964 at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, with the drums and gongs of Peking opera;

• in Japan, Akira Toriyama modelled Son Goku, the hero of the manga Dragon Ball (1984), on him: monkey tail, staff, flying cloud, and a name that is the Japanese reading of 孙悟空;

• Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话：悟空), an action role-playing game by the Chinese studio Game Science, released on 20 August 2024, casts the player as a staff-wielding monkey, the Destined One; the studio announced more than 10 million copies sold within days of release.