Journey to the West Updated +Created
This is just the most charming of the Four Great Classic Novels.
The definitive television series adaptation is obviously Journey to the West. It just manages to capture all the charms of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie.
Sun Wukong Updated +Created
Only after Ciro became an adult did he finally understand that Sun Wukong was the basis for Dragon Ball as mentioned at: Figure "19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong". And that Sun Wukong was a million times more famous overall. Mind blown.
His given name "Wukong" literally means "the one who mastered the void" (Wu = Comprehend, Kong = void), so clearly a Dharma name. Edit: it is actually given in the novel, he was born without name. They seem to be Taoist however.
The family name sun1 孙 is the same character as "grandson", but most educated Chinese people seem to be able to recognize it as a reference to "monkey" from some archaic context not anymore in current usage.
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of Sun Wukong
. Source. TODO check that it is actually 19th century. Because en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Xiyou2.PNG for Zhu Bajie, obviously from the same print, says it is 15th centure.
Figure 2.
20 Sun Wukong depiction in Peking opera
. Source.
Zhu Bajie Updated +Created