Sun Wukong, the Monkey King

Sun Wukong, better known in the West as The Monkey King, is a beloved trickster-god who stars in the classical Chinese epic Journey to the West – an existential tale about spiritual enlightenment, heroism, and the journey of a small group of monks in search of the holy teachings of the living Buddha.  He was also an, ill-tempered bipedal talking monkey who was smarter than Dr. Zaius, more diabolical than Gorilla Grodd, and so incredibly hardcore that Jet Li played him in a movie, and his story is so crap-your-pants insane that I could tell it straight-up without any of my beloved hyperbole and you would still think it was one of the most over-the-top things you've ever heard.

Born in the Mountains of Flowers and Fruit when a magic stone gave birth to an egg that was transformed by the wind into a stone monkey, this celestial chimp spent his early years in existence shooting light beams out of his eyes and befriending the monkeys, tigers, leopards, apes, elephants, wolves, and bears of the land.  While regular monkeys wanted to do normal monkey-related things like eat bananas and fling poop at stuff, the Stone Monkey discovered a magical paradise by jumping through a waterfall and landing in heaven on earth.  The beasts and ferocious animals of the land were so impressed that they made him their King and started bowing down to him all the time, and he took the Imperial title "Handsome Monkey King".

Monkey ruled over the beasts for a few centuries, but that got boring so he went on a ten year voyage West, climbed a mountain on the Western Continent, and became a student of one of the great Patriarchs of Taoism.  For the next several months, Monkey trained with the Tao master, learned the secrets of immortality, and was taught 72 different magical kung fu styles, like how to fly, turn invisible, summon monsoons, breathe water, belch smoke bombs out of his mouth, and spontaneously shapeshift into a huge-ass evil-looking mega-demon with three heads and six arms and possibly four asses.

Monkey was unceremoniously expelled from the temple by the Patriarch for turning himself into a pine tree without proper authorization, so he somersaulted onto a cloud and flew home, only to discover that his people had been displaced and oppressed by a giant sword-swinging monster known as the Demon King of Havoc.  Monkey, who is basically the ultimate god of not taking crap from anything or anyone regardless of rank, stature, , ran out to the Dark Lord's lair and challenged the monstrous creature to a duel by insulting him vociferously and without mercy.  The Demon King was roughly about the size of Godzilla wearing a suit of platemail armor and carrying a two-handed razor-sharp sword, but Monkey overcame his substantial size difference by spontaneously cloning himself into hundred smaller monkeys, all of which flew through the air and kicked the behemoth warrior in the head in a 50-hit freak-monkey facekick combo.  While the demonic monster was distracted by all the flying baboons pummeling the crap out of his facial, the Handsome Monkey King tore the massive sword right out of the bastard's hand, jumped up ridiculously high into the air, and split the foul creature's skull with a simian deathblow that was like an axe cleaving through a water balloon.  The clone monkey army shrieked like overexcitable chimps, grabbed sticks, overwhelmed all of the demonic imps in the Demon King's army with brute force, and set the imp homeland on fire until everything was dead.

Monkey returned to tell his loyal subjects about how he once-again bailed their asses out, and then ensured that similar levels of demonic enslavement would never happen again by breaking into a powerful nearby city, plundering the armory of all of its weapons, and training his army of monkeys and tigers in hand-to-hand combat.  Realizing that no mortal weapon was badass enough for him, however, Monkey then went to the bottom of the ocean, met the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, and demanded the dragon fork over a death implement worthy of Monkey's unwaveringly-intense badassitude.  The Dragon King gave Monkey a suit of gold armor, a helmet made of Phoenix plumes, and gigantic iron cudgel that had once been used by a mighty hero to pound out the ocean floor.  This was sufficient, but the Monkey King was such an arrogant jackass about the whole thing that the Dragon King went complaining to the Jade Emperor of Heaven, who sent the Planet Venus to arrest Monkey and bring him to Heaven.

Monkey voluntarily traveled to Heaven (he figured it was time he saw what the big deal was) and the Jade Emperor was amused by Monkey's assholish behavior enough to give him a chance at redemption.  Monkey was appointed to be the stable-boy of the gods, but our self-aggrendizing anti-hero deemed the post to insignificant for someone of his stature so he violently flipped over a fully-loaded super buffet table, fled back to Earth, and declared his new title to be "Great Sage, Equal of Heaven."  This blatantly-awesome display of cojones of course pissed off the gods, who sent a powerful Celestial warlord named General Mighty-Mighty to beat Monkey into submission.  Mighty-Mighty went down to the Mountains of Flowers and Fruit looking to make a little bit of charred monkey-brain paté, but to his surprise his entire army was single-handedly battered into paste by the cudgel-swinging chimp and his righteous rod of cranial destruction.  Realizing they couldn't beat the Monkey in the arts of war, the gods called him back to Heaven and decided to keep an eye on him by making him the guardian of the Peaches of Immortality, which was a significantly more prestigious task than the whole stable-boy thing.  They even let him keep his title – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven – because it's not like they could really do anything about it anyways.  Unfortunately for the gods, they had yet to realize the time-honored axiom that you can never trust a monkey – no sooner did the gods turn their backs than Monkey ate all the Immortality Peaches, broke into the home of Lao-Tsu (the real-life historical founder of Taoism), drank all of his wine, and fled Heaven once again, incredulously laughing about how all the gods could possibly be so incredibly idiotic.

That was it.  The full might of Heaven's army converged on Monkey's palace in the Mountains of Flowers and Fruit, but once again the Great Sage didn't give a crap.  Monkey personally defeated the planets and the stars in battle, smashed the main army of Heaven, and it was only after a super-intense, planet-spanning battle that Monkey was subdued by the nephew of the Jade Emperor.  Monkey was dragged back to Heaven to be executed, but he had eaten so many of the Peaches of Immortality that he had actually become invincible, and not even the weapons of the gods could harm him.  Monkey took advantage of the situation, broke free, and did battle with thirty-six Thunder Gods, but then the Buddha showed up, turned his hand into the Mountain of Five Elements, and slam-dunked the Himalayas on top of the Monkey King.  He was imprisoned beneath this hellacious mystical mountain, pinned down in such a way that he could only move his head, and every couple days some heavenly messenger would show up and throw a pot of molten-hot copper into Monkey's face.

For 500 years, the Handsome Monkey King was trapped beneath the Mountain of Five Elements.  Finally, one day a wise monk named Hsuan-Tsang came by on a holy quest – he had been tasked with journeying 108,000 miles over land from China to India and recovering the Sacred Scriptures from the Buddha himself.  The old wise man was definitely in need of a bodyguard capable of cranking demons' heads off with his prehensile thumbs and murdering river gods by cracking them in the balls with a baseball bat made out of angry piranhas.  While crossing the Himalayas, Hsuan-Tsang came across Monkey in his unfortunate state, and freed him from his ridiculously-uncomfortable incarceration.  Monkey, having been taught a little humility over the course of 500 miserable years underneath the soul-crushing weight of the most devious monolithic monstrosity geology has to offer, agreed to do some penance, become a Buddhist priest, and serve as Hsaun-Tsang's disciple along their journey.  Hsuan-Tsang, understandably a little hesitant to journey around with a talking Monkey god that once tried to face-kick the Buddha himself, ensured his own personal safety by tricking Monkey into putting on a stylish magical hat.  The hat was cursed so that any time the Monkey acted like a jackass, all Hsuan-Tsang had to do was recite a quick spell and the Monkey suffered such an excruciatingly-painful migraine headache that his eyes would bug out of his head like a cartoon character.

Even though he was a little upset about being cock-blocked every time he tried to murder his new master, Monkey made the best of what he had.  His first act of freedom was to warm up his muscles by killing a tiger with his bare hands and turning its coat into a robe, and not long after slaughter six punk brigands who tried to rob Hsuan-Tsang. 

For the next fourteen years the two heroes journeyed across the land, passing through unexplored caverns, treacherous cliffs, impenetrable mountains, and impassable rivers, never deterred from their sacred quest.  They took on a couple of disciples – a pig-headed demon named Pigsey who fought with a nine-pronged muckrake gifted to him by the Jade Emperor, a red-haired river demon who wore a necklace of nine skulls, and a water dragon Prince that turned himself into a white horse for the monk to ride – and got help from wise bodhisattvas and an army of ghostly spirits, but in the end it was Monkey who usually ended up saving the day through his wise and judicious use of extreme physical violence.  When he wasn't boasting about how awesome he was, taunting his enemies, citing bizarre nonsensical proverbs, or calling his friends idiots, fools, or whimpering simps, Monkey stole a water-breathing horse from a giant Bull Demon, seduced the goddess of Fire Mountain (and then called her a "hussy" as he was running away), and achieved spiritual oneness with the world somehow.  Together, the funky monks overcame 81 ordeals, recovered the sacred scriptures, met the living Buddha, and ultimately saved the souls of the populace by giving them spiritual enlightenment and general awesomeness.  Monkey was promoted to the rank of Living Buddha, becoming known by the honorific title "Buddha Victorious in Strife" because every time there was a battle to fight he ended up seated on top of a pile of beat-to-hell corpses.  Nowadays he is easily considered the greatest and most popular folk hero in Chinese mythology.

This story, and many other mythological stories like it, are available in my book Badass: Birth of a Legend. I am currently drowning in preparations for my first child to arrive basically any day now, so I’m running an old classic, but I’ll be back next week with a new one.