You may have never heard of him, but Sun Wukong, aka the Monkey King, has been adored in the world’s most populated country for centuries. And he’s been introduced into Western culture, too. On the cusp of the Year of the Monkey, James Trapp of the Institute of Education Confucius Institute examines the Monkey King's roguish charm.
Who is the Monkey King?
Cloud-leaping, shape-shifting, demon-killing and magic staff-wielding, the Monkey King is perhaps the most enduring figure in Chinese literature and folklore. He is the ultimate bad boy made good – he causes havoc in heaven, uproar under the sea, returns from the dead to continue his mischief, and even survives the fires of heaven. He is so powerful, only the Buddha can subdue him, but in the end, he finds redemption as the faithful servant and protector of the saintly monk Xuanzang, who is on a pilgrimage to collect scriptures.
Where did the Monkey King come from?
Sun Wukong first appears in The Journey to the West, one of the four great classic novels of Chinese literature. It was written by Wu Cheng'en in the second half of the 16th century CE and tells a fictionalised, romanticised version of Buddhist monk Xuanzang's real-life pilgrimage from China to India in the seventh century. However, the book is more than a fictionalised travelogue – it is one of the great fantasy novels of world literature. It is a wonderful blend of historical fact, folk beliefs and Daoist and Buddhist traditions, held together by the figure of the Monkey King.
It is likely that the Monkey King started his life as a foreign import and was probably inspired by the Hindu monkey god Hanuman. In the Ramayana, an epic poem written in the fourth century BCE, Hanuman is a monkey general who volunteers to help the god Rama rescue his wife Sita from the demon king Ravana. The similarities in both storyline and attributes between the two monkey immortals are striking. The suggestion of foreign influence on one of China's great folk heroes only serves to demonstrate the ability for Chinese civilisation to absorb influences, experiment with them and turn them into something uniquely and unmistakeably Chinese.
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