Sun Wukong

Sun Wukong is born already strange: a stone egg on Flower Fruit Mountain splits open in the wind and a monkey climbs out, bows to the four directions, and sends a beam of light up to the Jade Emperor's court before anyone has given him a name. He crosses the sea to study under the Taoist patriarch Subhuti, who teaches him seventy two transformations and the cloud somersault that carries him thirty four thousand miles in a single leap, then expels him for showing off. He descends to the undersea palace of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea and talks his way into taking the Ruyi Jingu Bang, an iron pillar that shrinks to the size of a sewing needle and tucks behind his ear, or grows to smash a mountain. He then travels to the underworld and strikes his own name, and every monkey's name with it, from the Book of Life and Death, so that none of his kind can be summoned to die.

Offered a minor post in Heaven as stableman to buy his cooperation, he discovers the insult once he learns the rank and declares himself Qitian Dasheng, Great Sage Equal to Heaven. He eats the Queen Mother of the West's peaches of immortality, drinks the elixir of the Taoist elder Laozi, and fights the Heavenly Court to a standstill until the Buddha wins a wager with him and buries him under Five Elements Mountain, where he stays five hundred years until Journey to the West's pilgrimage narrative frees him.

Freed from the mountain by the bodhisattva Guanyin on the condition that he escort the monk Xuanzang to India for the Buddhist scriptures, Sun Wukong spends the rest of the novel as the pilgrimage's fighting strength and its least governable member. Guanyin fits him with a golden headband he cannot remove; when Xuanzang recites a particular sutra it tightens and drops the Monkey King to his knees, the only leverage a mostly powerless monk has over a companion who can level mountains. Across the journey Wukong fights demons, kings and rival immortals, argues constantly with the pig hearted Zhu Bajie and the placid sand spirit Sha Wujing, and is banished by Xuanzang more than once for killing an enemy the monk mistook for an innocent, only to be needed back within a chapter or two.

He completes the pilgrimage and is granted Buddhahood as the Victorious Fighting Buddha, the novel's reward for a character whose whole arc runs from cosmic rebellion to disciplined service without ever losing his temper, his pride or his loyalty. Beyond the novel he is a stock figure of Chinese opera and popular religion, invoked at some folk shrines as a guardian against evil, and his transformations, staff and cloud somersault remain some of the most reproduced images in East Asian popular culture down to modern film and television.