From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint: The Monkey King

Abstract

The novel Monkey or Journey to the West tells of a simian's revolt against Heaven, of its defeat by the Buddha, and of its later being recruited as a pilgrim to protect the monk Tripitaka on his quest for scriptures in India. This essay traces Monkey's background to a) a mythic battle between a land deity and a water deity; b) a myth about an aboriginal in a medieval forest who is converted by Buddhist missionaries and becomes a saint who protects his new faith, just as St. Christopher, originally a subhuman Dog-man in the forest, became the patron saint of travelers; c) a folk Zen parody of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng (who was called a barbarian monkey); d) an ancient tradition about the Chinese Titansthe demigods of Xia-striking back at the Zhou god of Heaven that displaced them. The appendix goes into the folklore of the Frog, a chthonic deity kept alive among southern non-Chinese aboriginals.