Wukong

At the summit of the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit in the Eastern Continent of Anga, an immortal stone, nurtured by the spiritual essence of Heaven and Earth and the vital energy of the sun and moon, suddenly split open and gave birth to a stone monkey. He boldly entered the Water Curtain Cave, and the troop of monkeys honored him as the Monkey King. Seeking immortality, he crossed oceans to take Patriarch Subodhi as his master. There, he received the name Sun Wukong and learned the Seventy-Two Transformations and the Cloud Somersault. After returning to his mountain, he stormed the Dragon Palace and obtained the Golden Cudgel. He also broke into the underworld and erased the monkeys’ names from the Register of Life and Death, alarming the Heavenly Court. The Heavenly Court first tried to placate him by appointing him the Keeper of the Heavenly Horses, but Wukong despised the low rank and rebelled, proclaiming himself the “Great Sage Equal to Heaven”. He wreaked havoc at the Peach Banquet, stole and ate the celestial elixir pills, and defeated the heavenly armies and generals. The Jade Emperor summoned Erlang Shen, and with help from Laozi’s magical steel bangle, Wukong was captured. Laozi threw him into the Eight Trigrams Brazier to refine him, but instead, he emerged with fiery eyes. In the end, the Buddha intervened and pinned him beneath Five Elements Mountain for five hundred years. Later, enlightened by Bodhisattva Guanyin, he became Tripitaka’s disciple and, together with Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing, subdued demons and overcame eighty-one ordeals to obtain the true scriptures, ultimately attaining Buddhahood as the Victorious Fighting Buddha.