Born from a stone egg on a mountain crag, "fructified by the breath of the wind," a monkey learns to fly, to wear seventy-two shapes, and to make himself immortal twice over — and so becomes the most tireless magician on the Chinese shelf. This address reads "Sun as magician", and its one witness, Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), tells "How the Monkey Became a God": the Immortal who schools him "gave him the family name of Sun" and the personal name Wu-k'ung, "Discoverer of Secrets", then "taught him how to fly" and "to change into seventy-two different forms."

Every fitting of the sorcerer is here. From the Dragon-king's sea-bed Sun draws an iron rod he engraves "Gold-bound Wand of my Desires", a weapon that can swell to touch the sky or shrink to a needle he tucks behind his ear. Sealed for forty-nine days in the alchemist Lao Chün's white-hot furnace, "Sun lifted the lid, emerged in a rage, seized his magic staff," wholly unharmed. Only the Buddha out-conjures him: wagering the monkey cannot leap clear of his open palm, he lets Sun streak to the five red pillars at the edge of creation and write his name there — then shows the same boast along his own finger, saying "you never went out of my hand". Seizing him, the Buddha folds "his five fingers into the five elements," five mountains that pin the magician flat.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this shelf its numbers, filed here a single Chinese authority and no other; no second tradition stands beside the monkey. And there is a quiet joke the record keeps straight-faced, for the address names a magician called Sun while its witness is a monkey whose surname is Sun. When a shelf files a shape-shifting monkey under the sun's own name, which reading is the accident — the beast, or the star?