Monkey Magic

There's a very old and famous work of Chinese fiction called The Westward Journey (西遊記), which is an epic about a Buddhist monk, a magic monkey king, and a fat and lazy pig-man who journey from China westward to India to retrieve some Buddhist texts. The journey is wrought with mischief and danger, magic and trickery, battles amongst humans and supernatural creatures, and valuable words of wisdom with moral lessons learned the hard way. This fantastic tale is actually loosely based on reality - there really was a Chinese Buddhist monk who made the arduous journey to retrieve Buddhist texts in India.

So all this is leading to a conversation I had with my British roommate about Taoism, and how some Taoists actually built temples to worship the fictional pig-man and monkey king. While The Westward Journey embellishes on a slice of Buddhist history, Buddhists as a rule do not worship characters from a fictional work of literature. To my astonishment, my roommate started telling me the story, the background of why the monkey king wears a tight crown on his head, and other little details of which I had had no idea seeing as I've only ever briefly heard of the story but never actually read it or sat through the numerous television series that have been made from this classic tale. Apparently, the Japanese made the story into a television show geared towards children in the 1970s, and it was later dubbed in English, renamed "Monkey," and broadcasted to a generation of British children. My roommate used to love this show, and was sad when it was cancelled after the second season. This was also one of the first media exports from East Asia to Britain, this and Bruce Lee.

Check out the first part of the first episode if you don't believe me:
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=-gmABsTi1-k