This week on MYTH, we’ll continue Monkey’s epic journey to the west to retrieve Indian magic. The story is slowly nearing it’s conclusion after our break for a very special Valentine’s Day. This is the fifth episode on the epic tale of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. If you haven’t heard the first four parts, I’d recommend going back and listening. The first episode provides a lot of back story on the Monkey King and on the chinese cosmology, the second tells how this whole quest thing got started, the third tells Sanzang got tricked into banishing Monkey from the party, and the fourth tells how Sanzang ended up hanging from a tree surrounded by bandits. To summarize, Monkey was trapped by Buddha and could only be released if he served the monk Sanzang on his journey to the west to retrieve the magic sutras from India. Along the way, getting into a stupid amount of trouble and getting out mostly through literal deus ex machina, they acquire two more disciples: Ogre and Piggy.
After some sitcom antics, Sanzang figures out he’s been tricked by demons into distrusting Monkey, and they all become one big happy party again just long enough for Sanzang to nearly get his dick sucked by a scorpion demon. Monkey gets the gods of the stars to burn her to dust. Not long after, Monkey forgets how much trouble Sanzang gets into on his own and goes scouting. The monk is promptly kidnapped by bandits and strung up in a tree. Monkey murders all of the bandits, and Sanzang gets all pissy about it. They find an imposter Buddha who manages to trap a significant fraction of the Chinese gods in a bag, but Monkey eventually finds the right god for the job. Sanzang again gets super pissed that somebody want a piece of the holy D, and they find a castle with a sick king. Monkey plays doctor, and gets sent after a wife kidnapping demon to fix the king. He saves the monk, only to lose him again, this time to a harem of slutty girl demons. In this episode, you’ll learn that a woman’s reaction to fighting is to get naked, that the strongest negotiating position is inside your opponent’s stomach, and that the original formula for viagra involved the beating hearts of a thousand young boys. Then, in Gods and Monsters, it’s subtly named Mongolian Death Worm, which may or may not have sprung from the pages of Dune.