Hearing this, the patriarch was secretly glad, and said: 'Put that way, you are a thing formed by Heaven and Earth itself.

暗喜 (àn xǐ) — secretly pleased, and he does not tell the monkey why. The reason arrives at once for the reader: 天地生成的, a thing formed by Heaven and Earth. No parents means no inheritance, no clan, no accumulated family karma. It is the least encumbered student a teacher could hope for.

Get up and walk about, and let me see you.' The Monkey King sprang to his feet and waddled back and forth a couple of times.

縱身跳起 is to spring up (縱 zòng), and 拐呀拐的 is a lovely piece of sound-writing: 拐 (guǎi) is to walk with a lurch, doubled around the little filler sound 呀 to make a waddle you can hear. He has been told to walk up and down so the master can look at him, and he waddles. The surname is about to come out of this.

The patriarch laughed: 'Mean and ugly though your frame is, you do look like a pine-nut-eating macaque (húsūn).

鄙陋 is coarse and unsightly; the master is not flattering him. The word that matters is 猢猻 (hú sūn), the plain everyday word for a macaque. The pine seeds he was eating at the gate come back here as identification — and those two ordinary characters are about to be taken apart to find a name inside them.

I'll take a surname for you from your very body — my thought is to surname you 'Hú' (猢).

就身上取個姓氏 — a surname taken off your own body, which is a strange and rather beautiful idea when the usual alternative is taking it from a father. 教 is jiào, to cause or have, and 姓 is working as a verb, "to be surnamed." He begins with 猢, the first half of 猢猻.

But if you take the 'beast' radical off 猢, you're left with 古月 ('old' and 'moon'): 古 means 'old,' and 月 means 'yin.'

Now the character-play. Strip the beast radical 犭 off 猢 and what is left is 古 and 月, "old" and "moon" (傍 stands here for 旁, the side-element of a character, read páng). The master glosses each in the classical 者…也 pattern used for definitions: 古 means old, 月 means yin — the moon being the standing emblem of the yin principle, dark, receptive, female. This is Chinese wordplay in its native form. Not sounds, but strokes.

Aged yin cannot beget and nurture — so it would be better to surname you 'Sūn' (猻).

化育 is to transform and rear, the classical term for generation itself, and 老陰 — aged yin — cannot do it (不 as bù before the rising tone of 能). The objection is cosmological rather than aesthetic: 猢 spells out something old and barren, so it is the wrong name for a creature at the very start of his growing. 倒好 is "better, rather" — try the other half.

Take the 'beast' radical off 猻, and you're left with 子系 ('child' and 'thread'):

The same operation on 猻: take off the beast radical and what remains is 子 (zǐ) and 系 (xì) — the two pieces that compose the surname 孫.

子 means 'a boy-child,' and 系 means 'infant, small' — which fits exactly the very idea of an infant.

子 means a boy-child (兒男) and 系 means infant-small (嬰, an infant; 細, fine or tiny), which 正合嬰兒之本論 — fits exactly the idea of the newborn. The contrast with 古月 is the entire argument: one name says old and barren, the other says infant and generative. There is a wink here for readers of inner alchemy too, where 嬰兒, the "infant," is a standard term for the immortal embryo the adept grows inside himself.

So I'll surname you 'Sūn' (孫), then.'

And it is fixed: 孫, sūn, built on 子, "child." One of the commonest surnames in China, arrived at by way of a macaque, a stripped radical and a short lecture on yin. The creature who was 石猴 and then 美猴王 now has a family name — the one thing his birth could never have given him.

When the Monkey King heard this, his heart filled with joy, and he kowtowed upward, saying: 'Splendid! Splendid! Splendid! Today at last I know I have a surname.

朝上 — facing upward, toward the dais (朝 cháo). 今日方知姓也 is "today, at last, I know a surname" (方, only now). The grandeur of the moment passes him by completely. He is simply thrilled to have one, and says so three times.

I beg the master's mercy: now that I have a surname, grant me also a given name, the better to be called by.'

乞 (qǐ) is to beg and 賜 (cì) is to bestow from above — the vocabulary of a petition to a superior, which he has picked up remarkably fast for someone who was a king last week. And his reason is wonderfully practical: 卻好呼喚, so that people have something to call him by.

The patriarch said: 'In my school there are twelve characters, assigned in turn for naming, and you fall in the tenth generation, a junior disciple.'

分派起名, names assigned by allocation. This is a real and still-living Chinese practice: a lineage fixes a sequence of characters, and everyone of one generation shares the same one in their name, so that a stranger's name tells you where he stands in the family tree. Religious schools borrowed the system wholesale. 第十輩 puts the monkey in the tenth generation (輩 bèi), a junior disciple (矣, the classical closing flourish). He has walked in off the ocean and been slotted straight into a genealogy.

The Monkey King said: 'Which twelve characters?'

那 is nǎ, "which." He asks, sensibly enough, to hear them.

The patriarch said: 'They are the twelve — Broad, Great, Wisdom, Sage, True, Thus, Nature, Sea, Bright, Awaken, Round, Enlightened.

The twelve: 廣、大、智、慧、真、如、性、海、穎、悟、圓、覺 — Broad, Great, Wisdom, Sage, True, Thus, Nature, Sea, Bright, Awaken, Round, Enlightened. Read them in pairs and the sequence is unmistakable: 智慧 is prajñā, 真如 is tathatā or Suchness, 圓覺 is perfect enlightenment. The Daoist immortal's naming-scheme is a Buddhist glossary. (The ninth character is 穎, yǐng, "bright, sharp-tipped," in the 維基文庫 text; some editions print the variant 頴.)

Counting down to you, it falls exactly on 'Wù' (悟, 'awaken'). I'll give you the dharma-name 'Sun Wukong' (孫悟空) — how's that?'

Counting down the twelve (排 pái, to rank in order), the tenth is 悟 — to awaken, to realise. Joined to the surname and to 空, emptiness, it gives the 法名 or dharma-name 孫悟空: Sun Awakened-to-Emptiness. Remember who is doing the naming. Subhūti, whose name this master carries, is the disciple the tradition calls 解空第一, foremost in understanding emptiness. He has handed the monkey his own speciality. And then, charmingly, he asks whether that will do — 好麼?

The Monkey King laughed: 'Splendid! Splendid! Splendid! From this day I'll be called Sun Wukong.'

好！好！好！ once more, and 自今, from today. The sequence the chapter has tracked from its first page closes here: a stone, then 石猴, then 美猴王, and now 孫悟空 — the name under which he walks into world literature.

Truly it was:

正是 cues the closing couplet, the storyteller's way of setting a seal on the chapter.

In the first cleaving of primordial chaos, there were no surnames at all;

鴻蒙 is the undifferentiated primal murk and 闢 (pì) is to cleave open, so the line reaches all the way back to the chapter's first sentences — before Pángǔ, before distinctions of any kind. Its point is that surnames are not primordial. Namelessness came first, and was innocent. What the monkey lacked was not a defect but an origin.

to shatter the stubborn void, one must awaken to the void — Wukong.

The pun the whole chapter was built to land. 頑空, "stubborn emptiness," is a real Buddhist term of reproach for the beginner's error of taking emptiness to mean mere nothingness, a dead blank. To break through it you need 悟空 — which is at once a name and an instruction, "awaken to emptiness" (悟 awaken + 空 kōng, emptiness). The hero and the goal are the same three syllables. This is what the chapter title's 大道生, "the Great Dao is born," has been aiming at all along.

There is no telling yet what fruit of the Way he would cultivate hereafter; so listen to the next chapter, and all will be explained.

The storyteller's standard sign-off, kept from the days when this was performed rather than read: there is no telling yet what 道果, fruit of the Way, he will cultivate — so come back for the next instalment (不 as bù before the level tone of 知). Chapter One ends on a cliff-hanger about homework.