Musings while reading Monkey King Journey to the West

June 1, 2025

• Monkey King is named Sun Wukong - Child awoken to emptiness. Sun can also mean monkey instead of child if, what is called as, the animal radical is included. Wu means awoken

• Tweeting from the Bureau of Rice Reincarnation. iykyk

• “Give him a government job.” seems to be a much older solution than I had imagined.

• Monkey’s job in heaven being imperial groom is telling. Given the age when this was written, horses, their variety, numbers, and complexity of upkeep must have been a well known thing. Also interesting that it’s a very lowly post, imperial context wouldn’t want to give importance to horses no matter how much they depended on them.

  • Monkey leaves corporate job to go back to startup life :P
  • Back to corporate position; promoted without pay boost.

• Ok, at chapter 4 and this is definitely a little projecting but the story is so open that I can. So this is how I see it.

  • Monkey is born, excels in class, but wants more.
  • Travels across oceans finds a sage, does a PhD.
  • Doesn’t really want to be in academia and wants to make an impact. Monkey finds that his people need help with many things.
  • Starts a startup. Is very successful at making monkeys strong. His skills, both technical and managerial, are better than just this much he thinks.
  • Goes to see if he can get a corporate job. Gets one. Is a terrible role.
  • Returns to startup. Corporate sees him as a threat in SWOT analysis. Decides to run him out of business.
  • Monkey proves to be a strong competitor. Corporate gives him high sounding position.
  • Unable to handle the responsibility of even the fake title, monkey gets drunk…
  • Burnt out, lies under a mountain for hundreds of years
  • Starts recovery by through obliquity
  • Monkey joins another startup with a long road ahead, uses his skills and experience to side step monsters.

• I’m surprised how common a name Erlang is even across the vast steppe

• Chapter 8 - so far encountered many small gods, in the Pratchett, sense. This chapter ends with a local spirit moving out of her shrine and going to live with the city god.

• The chapters leading to the actual start of the journey are unexpectedly heavy.

• It’s interesting that in this tale the hero of the story is not the person on the actual journey, Tripitaka.

• It’s clear that violence was ever present in the unknown. The repeated use of “self-delivering” meal and comparing that to the lack of such terms current tales also is an indicator of general peace that has been achieved through exploration and mapping of the world. We are less likely to become unwitting self-delivering meals.

• Nearing India the adventurers get Delhi Belly… or so it seems

• Ch. 31 The fiend that kidnaps Tripitaka is described suspiciously like Durga

• The fiends and demons sure love their Bond villain speeches

• The parallels with bureaucratic processes are interesting. It is not sufficient to just conduct services, you must write detailed reports about the proceedings and then post them to heaven by burning. I wonder if this was to fuel the scribal/printing industry.

• Another interesting bit is that Monkey does all the saving, the Buddha is barely involved, yet the saved always thank the Buddha. More often the Buddha seems to be the cause of the trouble in the first place.

• Buddha’s guides asking for bribes is hilarious

• “Immortality is a stickler for arithmetic”

• The actual lesson for attaining Buddhahood seems to be “fall in line”