Monkey - Wu Ch'eng-en

Do you remember the children's television programme 'Monkey'? It was a Japanese show, made in the late 1970s, to teach Japanese schoolchildren about Buddhist mythology, and told the story of how a boy priest, Tripitaka, travelled to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by Pigsy, Sandy, and Monkey. In the early 1980s, the show received an infamously bad, but nonetheless entertaining, English dub, which has gained something of a cult following in the West. Anyway, what many people who remember the show don't realise is that the story is based on true events, albeit somewhat loosely. The story of Monkey was written by Wu ...