The Monkey King
- Back to the Monkey King and his craziness.
- It's the morning after the dinner party and the Monkey King has just commanded all his monkey subjects to wear shoes and not disturb him. Someone's a little grumpy…
- The Monkey King stays in his super-deep Batcave and studies kung-fu even more.
- After forty days, he masters four major skills or "disciplines of invulnerability": the invulnerability to fire, cold, drowning, and wounds.
- Forty more days pass and he masters another set of skills, the "four major disciplines of bodily form": giant form, miniature form, hair-into-clones, and shape shift.
- What are these skills? They're pretty much exactly what they sound like. The Monkey King can get bigger and smaller (like Alice in Wonderland, only without the pills); he can also turn his loose hair into clones of himself and change the shape of his body. Pretty neat, huh?
- When the Monkey King finally emerges from his cave, he receives a notice from the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea that he's received the death sentence for "trespassing upon Heaven." If that sounds like trouble's coming to you, you're absolutely right.
- The Monkey King isn't worried, though. In fact, he's not even the Monkey King anymore since becoming a master of all those kung-fu disciplines. He renames himself the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. A small ego is definitely not one of his problems.
- The Monkey King strides off to make himself known to all those beings in Heaven.
- But before he does that, he makes a pit stop at the Dragon King's digs to deal with that little matter of his execution.
- When he gets to the Dragon King's place, he actually does get his head chopped off, but that doesn't matter because the Monkey King is no longer just a simple Monkey King—he's the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, which basically means he's the ultimate bad-ass.
- To point that out to the Dragon King, the Monkey King stomps on him. Now who's boss?
- The Dragon King isn't dead of course (all these guys are pretty much immortal), but he is humbled. In fact, he sees the Monkey King off and gives him a magic cudgel.
- Then the Monkey King visits Lao-Tzu, the patron of immortality.
- Then Yama, caretaker of the Underworld.
- Then the Jade Emperor, ruler of the Celestials.
- And he wreaks some serious havoc.
- Which is why all the gods, goddesses, etc. band together and complain about the Monkey King to the emissaries of Tze-Yo-Tzuh. Who's that? You and the Monkey King are about to find out.
- While the Monkey King is beating up some random guy, this towering, long-white-haired dude with a huge walking stick shows up and asks Little Monkey where his anger comes from.
- Being called Little Monkey doesn't go over too well with the Monkey King, which means Monkey's about to fight (again).
- But Tze-Yo-Tzuh is different. He's the creator of all being and things; he's the ruler of the universe. In other words, think God/Jesus, only Chinese and way into cryptic sayings.
- He tells Monkey that Monkey can never escape him, but Monkey's like, sure I can.
- So off Monkey goes on his cloud-steed to prove Tze-Yo-Tzuh wrong.
- Monkey flies everywhere until he reaches the end of world, where he sees five golden pillars.
- Like a total punk, Monkey carves his name onto one of the golden pillars. Then he pees on it. Class act, that Monkey, class act.
- Then he flies back to Tze-Yo-Tzuh and brags about what he's done.
- Only Tze-Yo-Tzuh has something up his sleeve. Literally, as in his hand and fingers, one of which has Monkey's name carved on it and pee at the base of it.
- Uh-oh. Yep—Monkey didn't really pee on a golden pillar; he peed on Tze-Yo-Tzuh's finger which was disguised as a golden pillar. The guy really is everywhere.
- But Tze-Yo-Tzuh's a decent man/creator of the universe. He calmly tells Monkey that he created Monkey and so he asks Monkey to please stop his violent rampage.
- Monkey almost seems to be listening. And then he decides to do the worst thing possible: he challenges Tze-Yo-Tzuh anyway.
- Tze-Yo-Tzuh just sighs and buries Monkey under a pile of heavy rocks, where Monkey stays for five hundred years.