Alarmed at his growing power, the Jade Emperor attempts to placate Sun Wukong by summoning him to heaven and giving him a minor post as keeper of the imperial stables. Discovering the position's low rank, Sun Wukong is deeply insulted and returns to earth in open rebellion, declaring himself the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, a title the celestial court eventually and reluctantly grants him along with an honorary post that carries no real duties, an arrangement that satisfies him only until he is excluded from the Queen Mother's Peach Banquet, prompting him to gatecrash it, devour the peaches of immortality meant for the assembled gods, and consume Laozi's own elixir pills for good measure.
The ensuing war between Sun Wukong and the assembled forces of heaven, including some of its most powerful generals and deities, ends only when the Buddha intervenes personally, wagering that Sun Wukong cannot even leap beyond the Buddha's own palm; failing the wager after a journey he believes has taken him to the edge of the universe, Sun Wukong is trapped beneath a mountain, the Buddha's transformed hand, for five hundred years, a punishment that becomes the origin point for his later redemption as the powerful and loyal, if still unruly, disciple who protects the monk Tang Sanzang on the pilgrimage to India that gives the novel Journey to the West its title. Timothy Richard's 1913 abridged translation, the first attempt to render the novel into English, frames this material through an explicitly Christian allegorical lens that later, fuller translations have moved away from.