Sun Wukong

On the fourth storey of the western pagoda at Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, a monkey-headed man crouches in grey granite. He wears a monk’s robe and sandals. A broadsword hangs in one hand, a rosary sits under the other thumb, a calabash gourd and a rolled sutra swing at his waist, and a thin band circles his skull. The masons finished that pagoda in 1237, more than three centuries before anyone printed the novel that made him famous, and salt wind off the Fujian coast has been wearing at his face ever since. Whoever carved him already knew who he was. That is the first honest thing to say about Sun Wukong: he arrived long before his book, and he has never stopped moving since.

The story the novel tells begins with a rock. On the summit of Flower Fruit Mountain sat a boulder that had been drinking sunlight and moonlight since the world was young, and one day it split and delivered a stone egg, and the egg weathered into a stone monkey. He learned to walk. He learned to climb. Then he learned the trick that made him a king, which was to be the only monkey in the troop willing to jump through the waterfall to see what was behind it. Behind it was a dry stone chamber with an iron bridge and a slab reading Water Curtain Cave, and he came back out through the falling water with his fur soaked and his mind made up. They crowned him on the spot.

Kingship bored him within a few decades, because he had noticed that his subjects kept dying. So he built a raft, crossed two oceans, wore human clothes badly, and eventually talked his way into the mountain school of a patriarch named Subhuti, where he was taught the arts that made him impossible. Seventy-two transformations, so that he could be a sparrow, a fish, a temple, a beetle in someone’s ear. The cloud somersault, one leap of which carried him 108,000 li. And a method of plucking hairs from his own body, chewing them, and spitting out a crowd of screaming duplicates of himself, which is the ability the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Taitō II chose to illustrate in 1836 when he needed a single image to mean Monkey.

He came home armed with all of it and immediately went shopping. The armoury of Flower Fruit Mountain had nothing heavy enough for him, so he walked down into the Eastern Sea, parting the water as he went, and stood dripping in the treasury of the dragon king Ao Guang demanding something better. What answered him was a pillar of black iron with gold bands at either end, a thing used to measure and settle the depths of the ocean, and it began to glow when he touched it. Thirteen thousand five hundred jin of it. He asked it to be smaller and it obliged, and it kept obliging, until he could tuck it behind his ear like a sewing needle and walk out past the very unhappy dragons.

Then he tore his name out of the ledgers of the dead, along with the names of every monkey on his mountain, and heaven finally noticed him.

The response was bureaucratic, which is the joke the novel never lets go of. Rather than fight him, the Jade Emperor’s court offered him a job. Sun Wukong accepted, moved into the celestial stables, and only discovered some time later that Bimawen, Keeper of the Heavenly Horses, is the lowest rank in heaven and not really a rank at all. He smashed his way out, went home, and had a banner made announcing himself as Qitian Dasheng, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven. Heaven, exhausted, gave him the title too, and put him in charge of the Queen Mother of the West’s peach orchard, apparently on the theory that a thief guarding fruit was better than a thief loose in the sky. He ate the peaches. He gatecrashed the Peach Banquet he had not been invited to, drank the wine, wandered into Laozi’s laboratory and swallowed the elixir pills like sweets.

The war that followed took the armies of heaven, the god Erlang, and a diamond snare thrown at the back of his head. Nothing would kill him. Blades turned. Lightning slid off. Laozi finally sealed him in the Eight Trigrams crucible and cooked him for forty-nine days, and Sun Wukong survived by crouching in the one corner belonging to the wind rather than the fire, where the smoke stung his eyes so badly that they set permanently gold and red, and could afterwards see through any disguise a demon cared to wear. He came out of the furnace angrier than he went in.

It ended with a bet. The Buddha offered him the throne of heaven if he could jump clear of an outstretched palm, and Sun Wukong laughed, somersaulted to the edge of the universe, found five pink pillars there, wrote his name at the base of the middle one, urinated against it for good measure, and came back to collect. He loses. The pillars were fingers, the writing was on the Buddha’s hand, and the hand closed and became a mountain. He lay under Five Phases Mountain for five hundred years with his head in the open air, eating iron pellets and drinking molten copper when he was hungry, until a monk called Xuanzang came up the road on his way to India for scriptures and peeled the seal off the rock.

What follows is fourteen years of walking and eighty-one ordeals, with Zhu Bajie the pig and Sha Wujing the river ogre and a dragon prince turned into a white horse, and Sun Wukong out in front of the party killing everything that tries to eat his master. He is very good at it. He is also fitted, at Guanyin’s suggestion and by way of a trick involving an embroidered cap, with a gold fillet that cannot be removed and tightens like a vice whenever Xuanzang recites a short spell. That band is the whole point. Every power he has is unanswerable, and none of them protect him from a mild, frightened, frequently wrong human being with three lines of verse.

His limits are all of that shape. The staff cannot be lifted by anyone who is not him, but he cannot simply put Xuanzang on his cloud and be in India by lunchtime, because the scriptures have to be earned on foot. His golden eyes see through every impostor except one, the six-eared macaque who copies him so exactly that neither heaven nor the underworld can tell them apart and the Buddha has to be called in. And his temper, which is the engine of every good scene in the book, is also the thing that gets him exiled from the pilgrimage twice. At the end he is made Douzhansheng Fo, the Victorious Fighting Buddha, and the fillet drops off his head by itself, having quietly stopped being necessary somewhere along the road.

Where he came from before the novel is a genuine argument. Lu Xun held that he grew out of native Chinese material, pointing to Wuzhiqi, the chained ape-demon of the Huai River. Hu Shi argued for Hanuman and the Ramayana carried east along Buddhist trade routes. Meir Shahar, writing in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1992, traced a third line back to the legend of Huili, founder of the Lingyin monastery at Hangzhou, where monkeys were actually kept. Most scholars now decline to choose. The oldest surviving text to feature him, a Song-era storyteller’s script called The Story of How Tripitaka of the Great Tang Procures the Scriptures, already has a Monkey Pilgrim who admits to stealing the Queen Mother’s peaches eight hundred years earlier and getting caught. The 1592 novel, published anonymously and usually attributed to Wu Cheng’en on evidence that remains contested, did not invent him. It gave a figure who had been loose in oral tradition for centuries his definitive shape, and then let him go again.

He is still going. In Keelung and Tainan and across the strait in Fujian, Qitian Dasheng temples burn incense to him under a hierarchy of Great Sages topped by a Fujianese stone statue over three hundred years old, and the smaller shrines send delegations each year to collect ashes from the older ones to keep their monkey armies supplied. A fictional character with a real congregation is an unusual thing. He would find it extremely funny.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sun Wukong?

Sun Wukong is the Monkey King, the shapeshifting immortal at the centre of the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West. He was born from a stone egg on Flower Fruit Mountain, learned Daoist magic, rebelled against heaven, and was imprisoned under a mountain for five hundred years before escorting the monk Xuanzang to India for Buddhist scriptures.

What powers does Sun Wukong have?

Sun Wukong knows seventy-two transformations, can travel 108,000 li in a single cloud somersault, and can turn plucked hairs into copies of himself. He carries the Ruyi Jingu Bang, an iron staff weighing 13,500 jin that shrinks small enough to sit behind his ear, and his gold-red eyes, fired in Laozi’s crucible, see through any disguise.

Why does Sun Wukong wear a gold headband?

The fillet was placed on him by trickery after his release from Five Phases Mountain, on Guanyin’s advice, to give the monk Xuanzang some control over him. When Xuanzang recites the tightening spell the band contracts painfully around Sun Wukong’s skull. It is the one thing that reliably stops him, and it falls off by itself once he is made a Buddha at the end of the pilgrimage.

How was Sun Wukong defeated by the Buddha?

The Buddha wagered that Sun Wukong could not leap out of his palm. Sun Wukong somersaulted to what he thought was the end of the universe, found five pink pillars, wrote his name at the base of one and urinated on it, then returned to claim victory. The pillars were the Buddha’s fingers, and the hand closed over him and became Five Phases Mountain, where he was trapped for five hundred years.

Is Sun Wukong actually worshipped?

Yes. Temples to Sun Wukong under his title Qitian Dasheng, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, operate in Fujian, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and beyond, where he is petitioned as a healer, exorcist and protector. Worship of him is documented well before the 1592 novel, including a stone relief of a monkey-headed pilgrim carved at Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou in 1237.

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