The Comparison of Monkeys: the Study of Hanuman from the Ramayana and Wu-K’Ung from the Journey to the West Kaijun Pan Mead Way, Bronxville, NY, 10708 Keywords: Hanuman, Wu-kung, Ramayana, Journey to the west, Cultural transformation, Hinduism Abstract: Because of the geographical conditions and the history of cultural communication between India and China in religion, philosophy, and even literature and art. It is very possible that the image of Hanuman influenced Ch’eng en Wu when he was writing The Journey to the Western and creating Wu-K’ung. As the first deity based on the picture of Monkey, the characterization of Hanuman was so perfect that it was not flexible enough. But it doesn’t stop the Indian to adore and worship this mighty monkey. Wu-K’ung produced by Ch’eng en Wu is a very mature image in the traditional Chinese literature. It is not only a typical synthesis of both native and exotic culture, but also individual model contained the personal thought and creativity of the author. The complexity of Wu-K’ung can be interpreted from different perspectives and recreated under different cultural backgrounds. 1. Introduction India is a country which has a long history and splendid civilization, and its epic the Ramayana is regarded as one of the essential works in India’s cultural history. Hanuman, who is portrayed as an all-powerful monkey in this epic, is worshiped by Indian people for thousands of years. It is well to be mentioned that, we can find there is a similar image with Hanuman, named Wu-K’ung, in The Journey to the West, which is one of the Four Great classic novels in China, and he was adored by Chinese public too. Why such two similar monkeys’ images exist in two neighboring countries? Whether there are some connections between these two monkeys or not? In this conference paper, I would like to compare these two images from different cultural backgrounds and study if there are some connections between these two monkey-like mythical figures, and whether the picture of Wu-K’ung was coming from Hanuman. From now on, I will follow several perspectives to discuss this possibility, including the origin of Hanuman and Wu-K’ung, their characters, the similarities in the plot of two books, the cultural influences of these two monkeys and so on. 2. The Origin of This Comparison Before analyzing this problem, I would like to introduce who raised this argument first. This problem was first pointed out by a Chinese scholar, named Hu Shi, in the 1920s. He published The Textual Research of The Journey to the West and presented “Wu Kong was imported from Hindu, instead of being born in China. The Indian epic Ramayana was utilized as the background of this monkey.” Many of the Chinese scholars endorse his opinion too. Also, there was a lot of opposition to that theory at that time, because still many Chinese scholars believed that Wu-K’ung was one of the most important symbols in Chinese classical novels. What they could not accept was Wu-K’ung would no longer be the symbol of native Chinese culture but a dependency of Indian culture. Lu Xun, another very famous Chinese author, insisted that the image of Wu-K’ung was actually from Wu Zhixie, which was a monkey coming from Chinese Myths and resided under the water. Because of Lu Xun’s high status in the Chinese academic circles, his ideas influenced plenty of scholars in the next generation. And another thing needed to be noticed is most of the scholars who hold the objective opinions were not deny the influence from Hanuman to 2021 4th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences & Humanities (SOSHU 2021) Copyright © (2021) Francis Academic Press, UK DOI: 10.25236/soshu.2021.015 78