The Monkey King
A monkey born out of a stone, a staff from the bottom of the sea, and five hundred years under a mountain
Page 1
In the eastern sea there is an island, and on that island stands the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, and on the very top of that mountain there lay, since the beginning of the world, a single great stone. It had been there so long that nobody could say how long. It took in the light of the sun and the moon and the wind and the frost for an age and another age — and then one morning it split open with a crack that was heard across the whole sea, and out of it rolled a stone egg, and the egg hatched, and what came out of it was a monkey. He got up on his four feet on the top of the mountain and looked around him at the sea and the sky and the blossoming trees, and he was perfectly well and perfectly delighted, and he bowed to the four quarters of the world, and two beams of golden light shot out of his eyes and went all the way up to the palace of Heaven.
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He fell in with the monkeys of that mountain and lived with them, eating fruit and drinking from the stream and sleeping under the pines, and he was happy. One hot afternoon the whole troop went up to bathe in the pool below the great waterfall, and somebody wondered aloud where all that water came from, and somebody else said that whoever could go up through the fall and come back alive ought to be made their king. Nobody moved. Then the stone monkey shouted "I will!", shut his eyes, and jumped straight into the roaring water — and came out on the other side of it into a dry cave with a stone bridge and stone bowls and stone beds and an iron tablet over the door with the name of the place carved on it. He went back out through the fall and told them. And they carried him in and sat him on a stone seat and called him King.
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He was king for three hundred years and more, and then one day at a feast he put down his cup and began to cry, and told the astonished monkeys that one day, however good the fruit was, every one of them would grow old and die — and that he intended to go and find somebody who could teach him how not to. So he built a raft and sailed away across the sea and walked across two countries, and after many years he came to a quiet courtyard in the western hills where an old Daoist master taught a few students. The master took one look at him and gave him a name: Sun Wukong, which means Monkey Awakened to Emptiness. He swept the courtyard for seven years before he was taught anything at all. Then he learned, very fast: seventy-two transformations, and the cloud-somersault that carries a person thirty-six thousand miles in one jump. And then he showed off in front of the other students, turning himself into a pine tree for the fun of it — and the master sent him home that same night, and told him never to say who had taught him.
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Back on his own mountain he found that he had no weapon worth the name, so he walked into the Eastern Sea — the water opened for him and let him down — and he called on the Dragon King and asked him, as one ruler to another, for something decent to fight with. The Dragon King brought out a sword, and a nine-pronged fork, and a halberd weighing thousands of pounds, and the monkey said they were all too light. Then the Dragon Queen remembered the iron pillar that held the sea level steady, which nobody had ever been able to lift. It was in the treasury, glowing faintly, banded with gold at both ends. The monkey walked up and put one hand on it and said that it was a little long — and the pillar shrank. He said it was a little thick — and it thinned. And he swung it round his head in the Dragon King's own hall and said it would do very nicely, thank you; and took it; and asked for a suit of armour on the way out.
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One night, asleep under a pine after a feast, he dreamed that two officers in black put a rope round him and led him away down a road to the gates of the Land of the Dead — and he woke up inside the dream, which is a thing that only happens to him, and asked them what they thought they were doing. They said his name was in the book and his time was up. So he took his staff out of his ear, where he had been keeping it, and walked into the record office and asked for the ledger. The ten judges of the dead, who had never had this happen before, brought it. He turned the pages until he found the line that said Sun Wukong, Stone Monkey, and then he borrowed a brush and crossed it out — and then, since he had the brush in his hand, he crossed out every monkey on the whole mountain as well. Then he gave the brush back politely and walked out, and he woke up under his pine tree. The ten judges wrote a letter of complaint to Heaven the same morning.
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Heaven decided to deal with him by giving him a job. The Jade Emperor sent down an invitation, and the monkey rode a cloud up through the gates and was made Keeper of the Heavenly Horses, and he did it extremely well for about a fortnight — until somebody let slip that it was the lowest post in Heaven and that he had been given it to keep him quiet. He put down the bucket and went home. Heaven tried again and made him Grand Guardian of the Immortal Peach Garden, which sounded magnificent and was, and the first thing he did was eat the peaches. He ate them for days, the ripest ones, the ones that give ten thousand years of life each, and then he found the hall laid for the Peach Banquet of the Queen Mother of the West, to which he had not been invited, and he drank the wine and ate the food and tried the pills of immortality out of Lao-tzu's furnace as well, for good measure. By the time the guests arrived, there was nothing left but the dishes, and a monkey on the roof, extremely well.
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So Heaven sent its armies after him, and that did not work either. He fought the heavenly host at his own front gate and ran rings round them; he turned himself into a sparrow and then into a fish and then into a temple, with his tail standing up behind as the flagpole, which is the only mistake he makes all book because no temple in China has a flagpole at the back. He somersaulted thirty-six thousand miles at a jump and the generals of Heaven could not keep up with him. He was put in Lao-tzu's furnace for forty-nine days to be melted down and came out of it perfectly well and considerably cross, with eyes that could see through any disguise from then on. Nothing Heaven owned could hold him. And all the while he kept shouting the same thing up at the sky, which was that he wanted the title he had given himself, and he wanted it in writing.
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In the end it was not an army that stopped him. The Buddha came, and listened to the whole of it, and then held out one hand and bet the Monkey King that he could not jump out of his palm. The monkey laughed and somersaulted thirty-six thousand miles to the five pink pillars at the end of the world, and wrote his name at the foot of the middle one to prove he had been there, and somersaulted back — and the Buddha opened his hand, and there was the monkey's own handwriting on the base of his middle finger. Then the hand closed, and turned over, and came down on him, and became a mountain; and the mountain was sealed, and the Monkey King was under it. He stayed there five hundred years, with his head and one hand out at the base of the rock. Kind people brought him fruit. The weather came and went. He was still alive, because he had crossed his own name out of the book, and he could not get out, and nobody could help him.
Page 9
Five hundred years later a young monk came along that road, walking west on a journey to fetch the scriptures, with a bundle and a staff and nothing else and no idea what he was doing. And from under the rock a voice called out to him to stop. The monk was extremely frightened — a voice coming out of a mountain generally is frightening — but he went and looked, and found a face. And the monkey told him the whole thing, five hundred years of it, in about a minute, and said that he had been told by the Lady in White long ago that a monk would come this way, and that if the monk would climb up and peel the seal off the top of the rock, the mountain would let him go, and he would walk the whole road west at his side and get him there alive. The monk looked at him for a while. Then he climbed the rock, which took him most of the afternoon, and took hold of the old paper seal.
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The seal came away, and the monk ran — because the mountain came apart behind him with a noise like the end of the world — and when the dust cleared the Monkey King was standing in the road, stretching, five hundred years stiff, grinning. He bowed to the monk and took him for his master, and he was given a name for the journey and a gold band for his head that would tighten whenever he behaved badly, which it did, constantly, for fourteen years. And then the two of them went west together, and were joined on the way by a pig and a river spirit and a dragon who became the monk's horse, and they walked ten thousand miles and met eighty-one disasters between there and India, and every one of them is another story. But the beginning of it is this one: a stone on a mountain, an egg, a monkey, a staff from the bottom of the sea, five hundred years under a rock, and a frightened young monk who stopped on the road when somebody called out to him.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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