Is the monkey king real

Answer 1

Let me answer your question with a question:

Does your imagination exist?

I'm not asking you if the things you imagine are real, I'm just asking you if your imagination itself is something that exists.

It would be kind of stupid to say that your imagination doesn't exist, right? I mean, you have one. Everyone has one. Everyone has one just like everyone has arms and legs and a head and stuff.

So if we can say your imagination exists, then in a sense we can also say that, at some level, on some plane or in some form of "reality", the things in your imagination also exist. Why? Because they are what your imagination is made of. Right?

So if they do exist in a sense within your imagination alone, how much more does something exist when it resides in the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people for many centuries??

At that point, it becomes even more "real" in a sense through its "shared-ness", and all of the things we can agree on about it become the "life" that it takes on.

In fact it probably reaches a point where, hell, even God(if we assume He exists) probably believes in the Monkey King.

So on that level alone you could say he's real.

Besides, people always do this thing where they say "So-and-so wasn't real, blah blah blah, etc." But then some archaeologists dig up some stuff and next thing you know everyone learns the truth. So what's to say that archaeologists won't someday dig up a hairy little fellow with a funky headband and some stone tablets saying that he was a chieftain of some sort who hung out with a bald, long-haired, reformed cannibal and a bloke with a massive deformed nose that looked like a snout? They could've been three weird outcast dudes who did a lot of psychedelic drugs or something and thought they were flying on clouds and stuff. Time goes on, their memories are erased and then they re-emerge in these "Fairy Tales" and everyone writes them off as "fictional". But who can really know?? It's kind of arrogant for people to be so sure of themselves....

So yeah, he's not necessarily "real" in the sense that the chair you're sitting in right now is, but there's more than one kind of realness anyway, right? Plus there's the fact that although people say he and Pigsy and Sandy were not based on real people, they never say that he and Pigsy and Sandy were not not based on real people. Of course they'd never dare say such a thing, because nobody really has proof either way. I mean, it was so long ago, in a different time and place without cameras and telecommunications and satellites and so on. Also, much of China is vast, and back in those days it was not so full of people....

So yeah, he's definitely "real" in a way, as long as you want him to be and as long as other people want him to be. And maybe one day people will discover that he was based on a true person that people never thought existed, too.

Remember: "Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha, said: 'With our thoughts, we make the World!'"

Besides, if your nature is irrepressible, if you are "aware of vacuity", and if you would write and/or pee on the fingers of the Almighty just to try to prove a point if you thought you could get away with it, then the Monkey King is within you no matter what anyone says and no matter what anyone discovers or fails to discover. Same with his two fightin' sidekicks: if you have the kind of nature that they had, then they are within you and are "real" in that way even if they didn't exist as actual people.

So there is the answer to your question! ^_^