Sun Wukong and Puti Zushi

The stone monkey left Mount Huaguo in search of long life, crossed two seas alone on a raft of wood, and found the Cave of the Slanting Moon and Three Stars on the Mountain of Numinous Terrace and Square Inch in the western continent. Puti Zushi asked where he had come from, gave him the name Sun Wukong, and set him in the cave to sweep, to answer, to hear the sutras and to learn his characters.

Seven years later the master struck him three times on the head; Wukong came in by the back door at midnight and received the formula of long life, the seventy-two transformations and the somersault cloud.

When his fellows cheered him under the pine one day and Wukong turned into an old pine to show off, the master rebuked him before them all, ordered him to leave the mountain at once, and forbade him to speak his master’s name. Wukong knocked his head on the stone steps in farewell and somersaulted back to the eastern continent; the Three Stars Cave shut its gate afterwards, and the master never appeared again on the road west.