Born from a stone egg atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, warmed into life by the elements themselves rather than born of any parent, the monkey who becomes Sun Wukong quickly distinguishes himself among the other monkeys by his boldness, leading them to discover a hidden paradise behind a waterfall and being crowned their king. Restless despite his new status, he travels far in search of the secret of immortality, eventually studying under a Daoist master who teaches him seventy-two transformations, cloud-somersaulting that carries him vast distances in an instant, and other powerful abilities.
Returning home, Sun Wukong terrorizes the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea into giving up a massive iron rod that can shrink to the size of a needle or grow to touch the heavens, the weapon he carries throughout the rest of his story, and forces his way into the underworld to strike his own name and those of his monkey subjects from the register that determines when mortal creatures must die, granting them all effective immortality by administrative erasure rather than any spiritual attainment.
The novel gives the monkey his name, Sun Wukong, only after this training, bestowed by his Daoist teacher and combining the surname Sun with a Buddhist-inflected personal name meaning Awakened to Emptiness, a naming that already hints at the disciple's eventual role even before the rebellion and long imprisonment that must come first, since a monkey that had learned wisdom without first learning the cost of pride would not, in the novel's own moral logic, have earned it.