Daily Deities #2: Sun Wukong

    Today's Daily Deity is Sun Wukong. It's not actually a topic I've been thinking about, but is one that my little brother Neel has been thinking about. So I decided to talk about Sun Wukong today.

    Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, is a character from Chinese Mythology. He comes to us by way of The Journey to the West, one of China's four great classical novels. Sun Wukong is a stone monkey who was born from a magic rock on a mountain called Flower Fruit Mountain. When the wind blew over him, he came to life and already knew how to walk and talk. This origin story could have been based off of that of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god of bravery, courage, and devotion. Anyway, Sun Wukong proves himself to be the bravest amongst the monkeys and becomes their king. One day, when one of his monkey citizens dies, he gets sad and so goes to a Taoist immortal to teach him knowledge and how to become immortal. He then uses an iron pillar from the palace of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, which he uses as a weapon.

    Sun Wukong is then taken to the underworld, which makes him angry, so he erases the names of all the monkeys that he knows from the records of the underworld, making them immortal. To control him, the Jade Emperor, the ruler of all deities in the Chinese heaven, gave Sun Wukong different positions in heaven. But, each time, Sun Wukong would abandon his post for some reason and cause tons of chaos in Heaven. Soon, the Jade Emperor is forced to send the entire heavenly army and their most powerful divine warriors and gods to fight and take down Sun Wukong, but they all fail. So Guanyin, a powerful Bodhisattva, suggests that they send Erlang Shen, a powerful warrior monk, to go and fight Sun Wukong, who he defeats with the help of Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who founded Taoism. They then fail to execute him many times before he escapes and starts causing more destruction in heaven. The Jade Emperor is finally forced to turn to Buddha himself. The Buddha is the enlightened founder and main deity, or focus, of Buddhism. Buddha easily uses his powers to test, and then trap Sun Wukong under a mountain for 500 years.

    Sun Wukong stays under the mountain until Guanyin meets him and tells him that a pilgrim will come and free him from the mountain, after which he must help the pilgrim get where he's going. The pilgrim who comes is the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang (or Tripitaka), who has been sent on a journey to the western heaven to obtain Buddhist scriptures. He frees Sun Wukong, who is then forced to help him on his journey. At first, he's kind of unhappy at this, but soon he takes the journey and it's purpose more seriously. Throughout the journey, demons kept trying to abduct Tripitaka to eat him, because it was believed that if he was eaten, then his flesh would grant them immortality. So, Sun Wukong was basically his bodyguard and constantly had to fight all kinds of demons throughout the story. By the time he had finished the journey, Sun Wukong had become fully enlightened. He got to meet Buddha again and achieved Buddhahood.

    That is the basic gist of it. The reason my brother is thinking about Sun Wukong today is because he was feeling a sense of mischievousness and fun, which reminded him a lot of the story of Sun Wukong, who was a very impulsive, incontrollable, and powerful trickster, and also very funny. Thank you for reading! Do you have a favorite character from The Journey to the West? Do you have a favorite story from The Journey to the West? Why? You're free to comment down bellow!