Every culture has its mythical (often religious) heroes and tales of quests, battles, immortality, death and redemption. For the Chinese, the main man is a monkey, variously referred to as Monkey, the Monkey God, Great Sage Equal to Heaven, or the Monkey King. Susan and Giles Collard have elected to use the latter in a new dance they’ve adapted from the best-known modern version of the 2000-year-old-legend.
This monkey’s gone to heaven (or has at least been reincarnated a few times).
The legends are based on a pilgrimage putatively undertaken by a Buddhist monk named Xuánzàng (or Hsuan-tsang) during the Táng dynasty (18 June 618-4 June 907 AD) in order to obtain Buddhist religious texts from India. Storytellers morphed the monk into a monkey, supposedly born of stone, who learned numerous tricks, including immortality from a magician, and
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Curious that the Monkey was supposedly born of stone. I had a first time realization today that the Buddha (who is in each of us, and Tom Terrific had much in common, that being that each could be confidently comfortable being tranformed into a rock or stone. Although Tom Terrific might accomplish this feat in a more timely manner. The Buddha’s awareness of time’s relativity is equivalent to Tom Terrific’s sense of shape relativity.