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MONKEY_TRICKS

                                           June 24, 2013

  Monkey: who stole the peach of immortality,
  who travels in thousand mile leaps,
  who pissed on the fingers of Buddha...



  The monkey we know is from
  the 16th century Chinese work        The novel presumably
  by Wu Ch'eng-en, "Journey to         has sources in older
  the West", which in the US,          folk tails and myth.
  is called "Monkey":

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West
  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/monkey-wu-cheng-en/1110894948?ean=9780802130860



                                                    I learned something of
                                                    this from Bill Weinberg
                                                    (who has a touch of the
                                                    monkey nature himself).

                                                                WEINBERG

                                                    He has a (very plausible)
                                                    theory that there is some
                                                    connection between this
                                                    Chinese Monkey King and
                                                    a Hindu figure from the
                                                    Ramayana: Hanuman, the
                                                    Monkey General.

                                                         FIRE_DANCE

                                                    The Ramayana dates to
                                                    the 4th or 5th century:
                                                    1000 years before Monkey.




    An oddity of the Kim Stanley Robinson novel,
    "The Years of Rice and Salt" is that at
    the outset we're told that the main            RICE_AND_SALT
    character is the re-incarnation of the
    spirit of Monkey, but nothing is done
    with that afterwards, and he just doesn't
    seem like Monkey.


                And in Kim Stanley Robinson's
                40/50/60 series of books, the
                main character in the story           GETTING_WARM
                often thinks about his essential
                primate nature, but neither he
                nor the author has the spirit of
                this trickster god about him.



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