A monkey is born from a stone egg, makes war on Heaven itself, and is enrolled at last among the gods. The tale fills the Hsi yu chi, a Chinese romance whose pages, according to Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), are crowded with "ghosts, demons, and fairies, good and bad" and known to every native. On the mountain Hua-kuo Shan an egg forms upon a rocky point, is "fructified by the breath of the wind," and "gave birth to a stone monkey" — Sun Hou-tzu, "the Monkey Fairy," whose eyes at birth shoot golden lightning as far as "the palace of the North Pole Star".

His pride carries him too far. Boasting that he can "change myself into seventy-two different forms" and cross a hundred and eight thousand li (a Chinese measure of distance) at one bound, he demands the sovereignty of Heaven — and Buddha meets him with a wager: that he "cannot even jump out of the palm of my hand." Sun leaps to the red pillars at the edge of the universe and writes his name there in proof, only to be shown the same words upon one of Buddha's fingers. "But, wretch," said Buddha, "you never went out of my hand". He is sealed for ages beneath a mountain of the Five Elements, and afterward, tamed to guard a pilgrim, made to wear a "Head-splitting Helmet" that tightens on his skull whenever he strays.

In the end it is service, not force, that makes the monkey a god. Having warded the pilgrim to the West and "subjugated evil spirits, ghosts, and demons", Sun is told before the Coming Buddha that he is "appointed God of Victorious Strife"; and his first wish, to be free of the helmet, is answered before he asks, for "If you have really become a Buddha" it should already be gone — he reaches up, and it is. The record files Hindu and other Indian witnesses of the monkey-god beside this one, but only the Chinese Hsi yu chi, in Werner's collection, is wired to served text. What does it mean that this god had to earn his place — by pilgrimage, penance, and the mastering of his own waywardness — rather than being born to it?