Who Was Sun Wukong Before Journey to the West? A Thousand Years of Rewrites (Part 1)

Most Western players met Sun Wukong in 2024, through Black Myth: Wukong. A reasonable assumption after finishing it is that the character comes from a 16th-century novel written by a man named Wu Cheng'en, and that everything before that is background noise.

It isn't. The Monkey King is roughly a thousand years older than the novel he is famous for, and he did not arrive fully formed. He began as a water demon chained under a mountain in a Tang dynasty notebook, passed through a Southern Song storyteller's script as a well-mannered monk who wrote poetry, picked up a wife and a criminal record in a play, and only became the figure you recognise in 1592.

This is part one: where he came from, and how he was locked into his final shape. Part two covers what happened afterwards — the four centuries in which he was rewritten into a god, a revolutionary, a tragic lover and a video game.

1. A hundred-year argument about where the monkey came from

The scholarly fight over Sun Wukong's origins started in the 1920s and has never fully ended. Three positions matter.

The native case: a demon chained under Turtle Mountain

Lu Xun — China's most influential modern critic — argued the case first. In A Brief History of Chinese Fiction he noted that the Ming novel transferred Wuzhiqi's "swift and shifting" nature onto Sun Wukong, with the side effect that the older story was forgotten.

Wuzhiqi appears in the Tang text Gu Yue Du Jing, attributed to Li Gongzuo. It is described as shaped like an ape, with a flattened nose and high forehead, a green body and white head, golden eyes and snow-white teeth; its neck could extend a hundred feet, its strength exceeded nine elephants, and it moved too fast to follow with the eye. It raised chaos in the Huai River until Yu the Great subdued it and chained it beneath Turtle Mountain, after which the river ran quietly to the sea.

Ape body, superhuman strength, an unruly temper, imprisonment under a mountain: four points that map cleanly onto the first act of Sun Wukong's life. Beyond Wuzhiqi there is a whole native tradition of monkey demons — shape-shifting apes in the 4th-century In Search of the Supernatural, the wall-scaling wife-stealing white ape of the Tang Tale of the White Ape, and a crowd of "ape spirits" in Song anomaly accounts. The scholar Cai Tieying has mapped this lineage in detail.

The foreign case: an imported monkey

Hu Shi, the leading figure of China's New Culture movement, reached the opposite conclusion. His phrasing was blunt: he suspected this immensely capable monkey was not a domestic product but an import from India.

He meant Hanuman, the monkey god of the Ramayana. Hanuman is the son of the wind god: he leaps the sea to Lanka, expands to fill the sky or shrinks to a mote of dust, lifts a mountain single-handed to fetch medicine for Rama, burns Lanka, and is captured and bound by the demon king before breaking free.

Zheng Zhenduo and the Sanskritist Ji Xianlin supported this direction. In Journey to the West and the Ramayana, Ji traced a plausible route: Buddhism travelled the Silk Road from the Eastern Han onward, and Chinese Buddhist translations are full of monkey birth-stories, including the monkey-king tales in the Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish and the Liu Du Ji Jing.

One honest caveat, because it is often skipped: this chain remains possible rather than proven. No complete Chinese translation of the Ramayana existed for most of Chinese history — Ji Xianlin's own full translation was not finished until the 1980s. So any Indian influence most likely seeped in through Buddhist stories, border-region oral tradition and imagery, not through anyone reading the epic and adapting it.

The hybrid consensus

After a century of argument, the mainstream position is that Sun Wukong is a fusion.

Chen Hong, in work reassessing the "Hanuman gene," points out that the division of labour is fairly legible. The abilities — seventy-two transformations, the somersault cloud, carrying mountains and diverting seas — sit closer to Hanuman. The narrative shape — the defiance, the punishment, the imprisonment — comes from the native tradition. Zhang Jinchi's summary in Studies on Journey to the West is tighter still: take Wuzhiqi's body and temperament, add Hanuman's feats, then let folk performers rework it for several hundred years.

Put crudely: the Monkey King's body is Chinese, and part of his skill tree is imported.

2. Southern Song: the first monkey with a role

The origin debate is about genetics. The first text to give this monkey a name and a job is the Southern Song Tale of Tripitaka of the Great Tang Retrieving the Scriptures.

It is the earliest surviving pilgrimage narrative, and it is short — around sixteen thousand characters. For scale, the 1592 novel runs to roughly eight hundred thousand. Yet the framework of the whole pilgrimage story is already there, and so is the monkey, under the name Monkey Pilgrim.

He introduces himself as the Macaque King of Purple Cloud Cave on Flower Fruit Mountain. He attained the Way before the monk ever set out, stole the Queen Mother's peaches of immortality in his youth, took eight hundred blows of an iron rod as punishment, and now volunteers to escort Tripitaka west.

The core furniture is in place: Flower Fruit Mountain, the stolen peaches, supernatural power, the escort role. The personality is a different character entirely.

This Monkey Pilgrim is composed, even bookish. He improvises poems after defeating demons, patiently answers the monk's questions, and shows none of the later impatience. His defiance is minimal — he accepted his punishment for the peaches without complaint and treats Heaven and the Dharma with reverence. He reads less like a rebel demon than like an enlightened monk serving as a bodyguard.

Which is worth sitting with: the earliest version of the monkey who would shout "the throne should rotate — next year it's my turn" was a rule-abiding cleric who wrote verse.

3. The Yuan–Ming transition: from pilgrim to Great Sage

Two forces turned that monk into a demon king: popular religion and the stage.

He was worshipped before he was finished

The title "Great Sage Equal to Heaven" was already circulating in popular religion by the Song–Yuan period, with an actual cult attached. Cai Tieying's fieldwork at the Twin Sages Temple in Shunchang, Fujian, documented a joint tomb for the "Great Sage Equal to Heaven" and the "Great Sage Reaching Heaven," together with statuary and inscriptions from the same period — evidence that a developed Great Sage cult existed in Fujian by the Southern Song at the latest.

This is the thread most retellings drop. Sun Wukong was not only written into existence; he was also prayed into existence. Ordinary people already had a monkey god who fought well, drove off evil and had a temper — and literature then absorbed that god into the pilgrimage story.

The play that gave him a criminal record

The key dramatic text is the Journey to the West zaju attributed to Yang Jingxian — six books in twenty-four acts, the most complete pilgrimage narrative before the novel.

A dating note, since this one is routinely got wrong in English sources: the play is often labelled a Yuan drama, but Yang Jingxian lived into the early Ming. It is safest to treat it as a work of the Yuan–Ming transition rather than a straightforwardly Yuan text.

Yang's monkey is no longer a dignified guardian. He has a full family — an elder sister, a younger sister, an elder brother titled Great Sage Equal to Heaven, a younger brother titled Great Sage Reaching Heaven, and a third brother. He calls himself the Great Sage Reaching Heaven, steals Laozi's golden elixir, the Queen Mother's peaches and wine, and the Jade Emperor's flowers, and after wrecking Heaven is pinned under Flower Fruit Mountain by Guanyin to wait for the monk.

The fiery eyes are here. The seventy-two transformations are here. So is the defiance — and so is a great deal of dirt: he abducts a princess as his wife, has entirely human appetites, and carries a streak of streetwise coarseness.

From here, only one round of editing separates him from the version the world knows.

4. 1592: the version that stuck

In the twentieth year of the Wanli era (1592), the Shide Tang workshop in Nanjing printed the illustrated hundred-chapter Journey to the West. Every adaptation of the last four hundred years is addition and subtraction performed on that edition.

On authorship, one thing needs stating plainly. The Shide Tang edition carries no author's name. Attributing it to Wu Cheng'en rests mainly on a Qing-era record — Wu Yujin's Shanyang Zhiyi and a local gazetteer listing "Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West" — and connecting that entry to this novel is an inference by later readers. The attribution has been disputed by Chinese scholars and has never been settled. So what follows describes what the edition does, not what a known man decided.

Three decisive edits

It cut him loose from everyone. The two rival Great Sages of the play were merged into one figure, and he was given an origin with no precedent: a stone on Flower Fruit Mountain, saturated with the essence of sun and moon, cracks open and produces an egg; the egg meets the wind and becomes a monkey. No father, no mother.

That single change strips out every family tie and marriage the earlier versions had accumulated. No sisters, no brothers, no abducted wife. A being with no social relationships can only act from his own nature — which is the technical precondition for freedom to work as the book's theme at all.

It turned the rebellion into an escalating arc. Stealing the peaches, stealing the elixir and wrecking Heaven had been separate incidents. The novel chains them: the stone monkey's birth, the waterfall cave, the title of Handsome Monkey King; the voyage to find a master and the training under Subhuti; the dragon palace and the iron cudgel, the underworld and the erased register of the dead; the first appointment in Heaven, the resignation over rank, the self-declared title of Great Sage Equal to Heaven; the second appointment, the peach garden, the ruined banquet, the war against a hundred thousand celestial troops; and finally the wager with the Buddha and five centuries under a mountain.

What matters most is the change of target. The Monkey Pilgrim offended one deity. The Great Sage of the play stole objects. But "the throne should rotate — next year it's my turn" attacks the legitimacy of hierarchy itself. That one line is what lifts a monkey demon into a symbol.

It cleaned him up — but not completely. The abducted princess and the sexual appetite are gone, and the coarseness is toned down. What stayed are the flaws that are not disqualifying but are genuinely unflattering: impatience, vanity, showing off, a taste for tormenting his companions.

Monkey, god, and human, stacked

The novel's hardest achievement to beat is that all three layers hold at once.

The monkey is the base coat. The pointed muzzle and blazing eyes survive the golden circlet and the monk's robe; demons still greet him as "the hairy-faced thunder-mouthed monk." Harder to hide is the restlessness: he cannot sit still beside his master, cannot walk past a peach tree, and plays pranks when bored.

The god is the capability. Seventy-two transformations, a somersault cloud covering 108,000 li, an indestructible body, eyes that see through disguise, and a cudgel weighing 13,500 catties that changes size on command. Nearly every one of the eighty-one ordeals is resolved by his power and his judgement — he can fetch reinforcements from Heaven and find weaknesses underground.

The human is where he falls short, and where he comes alive. He is quick to rage. He is vain — he loves being addressed as Great Sage and cannot tolerate being slighted, which repeatedly walks him into danger to win an argument. He bullies Pigsy for laughs. And he is sometimes genuinely cruel, finishing off demons who have already surrendered.

Readers can be thrilled by his assault on Heaven and hurt on his behalf when Tripitaka expels him. Both reactions at the same time — that is what the stacking buys.

Becoming a Buddha is not being tamed

The Sun Wukong of the early chapters is a loner. His idea of freedom is submission to nothing, and the dragon palace, the underworld and the war in Heaven are all in defence of that. He knows what he wants; he has no concept of what he owes.

The five hundred years under the mountain are the hinge. The aggression is worn down, and for the first time he has nothing to do but think. When Guanyin tells him a pilgrim is coming who can free him, he agrees without hesitation.

What follows can be tracked chapter by chapter. He goes from threatening to quit at the first argument, to worrying about his master's safety after being wrongly accused and thrown out. From swinging the cudgel, to using strategy, leverage, and occasionally mercy. From caring only about his own freedom, to caring about villagers and about his companions' lives.

A common reading holds that the pilgrimage is co-option — that his rebellion was ground away. The text supports a different account: his target changed. He becomes the Victorious Fighting Buddha not because he stopped fighting but because he found something worth defending. The move is from fighting for his own freedom to fighting for something larger, not from fighting to obedience.

Why every group could claim him

Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist material is present in the same character simultaneously, which explains how wildly different audiences all took him as theirs.

The Daoist layer sits in his origin and training: what Subhuti teaches is immortality practice, the transformations and the cloud are Daoist arts, the cudgel is iron forged by Laozi, and the elixir he eats is the core of Daoist internal alchemy. Qing dynasty Daoist commentators went so far as to read the entire pilgrimage as an alchemical operation.

The Buddhist layer sits in his path: his dharma name means "awakened to emptiness," he is called the "mind-monkey," the journey is read as the disciplining of that mind, and buddhahood is the endpoint.

The Confucian layer sits in his conduct: loyalty to his master, duty to his brothers, mercy toward civilians, courage against evil. He is insubordinate, but he does not bully the weak, take bribes, or break his word.

Three incompatible frameworks can each be run on the same character without contradiction. Among Chinese classical figures, that is rare.

Where this leaves him

A water demon chained under a mountain in the Tang. A poetry-writing bodyguard in the Southern Song. A princess-abducting demon king in the plays. A Buddha in 1592. Each transformation records what some group of people needed him to be.

1592 was not the end of the process — it changed what was being edited. From that year on, what got rewritten was no longer his origin but his meaning. Qing commentators, late-imperial revolutionaries, mid-century animators and a modern game studio each took a piece.

Part two covers those four hundred years: how a character in a book became a god in a temple, a revolutionary emblem, a postmodern tragic figure, and finally an intellectual property that anyone can rebuild.

Sources: Wuzhiqi is described in the Tang Gu Yue Du Jing, attributed to Li Gongzuo. Lu Xun's argument appears in A Brief History of Chinese Fiction; Hu Shi's "imported from India" claim in his Textual Study of Journey to the West; Ji Xianlin's transmission argument in Journey to the West and the Ramayana. Chen Hong and Zhang Jinchi represent two formulations of the hybrid position, the latter in Studies on Journey to the West. The Tale of Tripitaka of the Great Tang Retrieving the Scriptures is the earliest surviving pilgrimage text, roughly 16,000 characters. The Shunchang Twin Sages Temple tombs and statuary were surveyed by Cai Tieying. The Journey to the West zaju is generally attributed to Yang Jingxian, who lived into the early Ming; this article therefore treats it as Yuan–Ming transitional. The hundred-chapter novel refers to the 1592 Shide Tang printing, which carries no author attribution; the Wu Cheng'en attribution derives from Qing records and remains disputed. The link between Buddhist monkey birth-stories and Hanuman is scholarly inference rather than established fact, as noted above.

Images: traditional Indian devotional print of Hanuman; cover of a published edition of the Journey to the West zaju; a later painted portrait of Wu Cheng'en.