The Monkey King

Part One · The Stone Monkey

On the top of the Flower Fruit Mountain, far across the Eastern Sea, there stood a magic stone that had soaked up the light of the sun and the moon since the beginning of the world. One day the stone cracked open with a sound like thunder, and out tumbled a stone egg. The wind blew on the egg, and it hatched into a monkey made of stone. He blinked, stretched, and bowed politely to the four directions. Two beams of golden light shot from his eyes so brightly that they reached all the way to the palace of the Jade Emperor in heaven. The Emperor peered down through the clouds, saw a small monkey scratching his ear, and decided it was nothing to worry about.

The stone monkey soon joined a troop of ordinary monkeys, who spent their days climbing trees, picking fruit and splashing in the mountain streams. One afternoon they discovered a tremendous waterfall, and they made a promise that whoever dared to jump through it and come back unhurt would become their king. The stone monkey shut his eyes and leaped straight through the roaring water. Behind it, he found a dry and beautiful cave with stone tables, stone beds and stone bowls, as if it had been waiting for them. The monkeys moved in at once, and they named him the Handsome Monkey King.

For hundreds of years the Monkey King was perfectly happy. Then one evening, in the middle of a feast, he suddenly began to cry. "Someday I will grow old," he said, "and someday this happiness will end." An elderly monkey told him that there were wise teachers in the world who knew the secret of living forever. The next morning, the Monkey King built a raft out of pine branches and sailed away across the ocean to find one. He wandered for years, until at last he reached a quiet mountain where an ancient teacher named Subhuti lived with his students.

Part Two · The Magic Staff

Subhuti gave the monkey a name, Sun Wukong, which means "awakened to emptiness," and he taught him for seven years. Wukong was the quickest student the old teacher had ever had, and also the most mischievous. He learned to change himself into seventy-two different shapes, from a tree to a bird to a buzzing fly. He learned the cloud somersault, which could carry him a hundred and eight thousand li in a single leap, and a li is about a third of a mile. But one day he showed off his tricks in front of the other students, turning himself into a pine tree while they cheered, and Subhuti sent him away. "Go home," the teacher said, "and never tell anyone who taught you."

Back on the Flower Fruit Mountain, Wukong decided that a king needed a proper weapon. He dived to the bottom of the Eastern Sea and knocked on the door of the Dragon King's crystal palace. The nervous Dragon King offered him a sword, then a spear, then an enormous fork, but each one felt as light as a chopstick. At last the Dragon King showed him a great iron pillar that had once been used to measure the depth of the ocean. Wukong picked it up, and it shrank to fit his hand perfectly. It was a magic staff with gold bands on each end, and it could grow as tall as the sky or shrink as small as a sewing needle, which he kept tucked behind his ear.

Wukong was still worried about growing old. One night, he dreamed that he was dragged down to the land of the dead, where the officials kept the great Book of Life and Death, which recorded exactly how long every creature would live. He snatched the brush from the scribe's desk, crossed out his own name and the name of every monkey on the mountain, and marched out again. When he woke up, he laughed and laughed. Up in heaven, however, the Jade Emperor received a long list of complaints from the Dragon King and the officials of the dead. "Who is this troublesome monkey?" he demanded.

Part Three · Trouble in Heaven

The Jade Emperor decided that the cleverest way to control the monkey was to give him a job in heaven. So Wukong was invited up to the palace in the clouds and appointed Keeper of the Heavenly Horses. He was delighted at first, and he took such good care of the horses that they grew fat and glossy. Then someone laughed and told him it was the lowest job in all of heaven. Wukong was furious. He knocked over the gate, rode his cloud straight home, and painted a banner that said Great Sage Equal to Heaven. To keep the peace, the Emperor gave him the title, and also a new job, guarding the Garden of the Peaches of Immortality.

That was like asking a fox to guard the chickens. The peach trees in the garden ripened only once every three thousand years, and a single peach could let a person live forever. Wukong ate the biggest ones. Then he heard that the Queen Mother of the West was holding a grand banquet and had not invited him. So he sneaked into the banquet hall early, gobbled up the delicious food, and drank every drop of the heavenly nectar. Feeling sleepy and rather silly, he stumbled into the palace of the wise old Laozi and swallowed a whole gourd of golden pills that could make anyone immortal. Then he jumped onto his cloud and flew home before anyone noticed.

They noticed, of course. The Jade Emperor sent a hundred thousand heavenly soldiers to capture him. Wukong fought them all with his golden staff, turning himself into a three-headed giant with six arms whenever he needed extra help. At last a brave warrior god named Erlang chased him through a contest of changing shapes, sparrow against hawk and fish against heron, until the monkey was finally caught. Laozi locked him in a bronze furnace and kept the fire roaring for forty-nine days, hoping to melt him down. Instead, when the lid came off, Wukong jumped out, completely unharmed, except that the smoke had given him glowing golden eyes. He pulled out his staff and smashed his way through heaven.

Part Four · The Palm of the Hand

The Jade Emperor was desperate. He sent for the Buddha, who came from the west, calm and smiling, and found the monkey shouting in front of the throne room. "Why are you making all this noise?" the Buddha asked gently. "Because I am the greatest being in the universe," said Wukong, "and I ought to be the Emperor of Heaven!" The Buddha smiled. "Then let us make a wager," he said. "If you can jump out of the palm of my right hand, you may have the throne. But if you cannot, you must go back to the earth and learn some patience." Wukong nearly laughed out loud, because the Buddha's hand was barely as wide as a lotus leaf.

Wukong stepped onto the Buddha's open palm, crouched, and sprang into the air, somersaulting over the clouds again and again, until he came to the very edge of the world. There stood five enormous pink pillars, rising up into a blue mist. "This must be the end of everything," he said proudly. To prove that he had been there, he pulled a hair from his tail, turned it into a brush, and wrote on the middle pillar, The Great Sage Equal to Heaven was here. Then, being a monkey, he did something rude at the bottom of the first pillar, and somersaulted all the way back and landed in the Buddha's palm. "I went to the end of the world," he boasted. "Now give me the throne."

"You silly monkey," said the Buddha. "You have never left my hand." Wukong frowned, and then he looked down. On the Buddha's middle finger, in small black letters, were the words The Great Sage Equal to Heaven was here. And at the bottom of the thumb, there was a faint smell of monkey. The five pillars had been the Buddha's own fingers all along. Before Wukong could leap away, the Buddha gently turned his hand over and lowered it to the earth, and his fingers became a mountain with five peaks. The monkey was pinned underneath it, with only his head and one hand sticking out.

Part Five · Five Hundred Years

Up in heaven, everyone cheered and held a feast to thank the Buddha, and the Jade Emperor finally had his peace and quiet back. Down on the earth, the Monkey King stayed beneath the Mountain of Five Elements for five hundred years. The rain fell on him and the snow covered him, and the kindly spirits of the mountain brought him food so that he would not go hungry. He had plenty of time to think. Little by little, the proudest monkey in the universe began to understand that being powerful was not the same as being wise, and that the world was much larger than one jump could carry him.

At the end of those five hundred years, a gentle monk named Tang Sanzang came walking along the road beneath the mountain. He was on a long and dangerous journey to the west, to bring holy books back to China, and he needed someone strong and brave to protect him. The monk lifted a small paper seal from the top of the mountain, and with a rumble, the stones rolled away. Out jumped the Monkey King, dusty and grinning, and he bowed down low and promised to serve the monk faithfully. Their journey together took fourteen years and was full of demons and dragons and narrow escapes, but that is another story, and a very long one.