Millennia ago at the foot of the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, the Monkeyboy hatched from a stone egg. The mischievous little rapscallion, unsatisfied at only being the King of the Monkeys, sought immortality.
The bedlam that followed in the wake of the Monkeyboy’s antics, began to provoke the ire of the heavenly bureaucrats. As punishment for his delinquencies, the Jade Emperor had the Monkeyboy sealed in a cage of stone.
Centuries later, Buddha with his infinite compassion, decided to have the Monkey Boy released provided he assist a young monk retrieve holy scriptures from the untamed lands in the west.
The duo were to be joined by other curious vagabonds outcast from the Empire of Heaven. They stumbled from town to town carrying out good deeds and righting wrongs. The motley troop eventually completed their divine mission and successfully brought back the ancient texts to the Middle Kingdom.
The heavenly pencil pushers granted the Monkeyboy immortality and as reward for his arduous task, allowed him to wile out the rest of eternity in the opulence of Heaven.
That was where the original Chinese text “A journey to the West,” left off.
The Monkeyboy finally returned to the mortal realm, reincarnated as a humanboy, in 1983. His travels in the west and time spent drinking, and studying at a run-of-the-mill university in England, plus the return to his ancestral lands in the East, have largely gone unreported… Until now