Wukong has spent the previous chapter inside the senior demon's stomach, and the fight has reached the stage where the loser must find something to call the winner. The demon reaches for the grandest title he knows and stacks it up: most merciful, most compassionate, Bodhisattva, Great Sage Equal to Heaven. It is the vocabulary of the temple, aimed at a monkey who is at that moment standing on his liver.

Wukong's reply is the joke of the passage. He does not want the religious titles. He wants a kinship term, and a rude one: Grandpa Sun, or more exactly Grandpa-on-the-mother's-side, the outsider grandfather. Chinese kinship marks which side of the family you come from, and calling yourself someone's grandfather is a standing insult, roughly the force of telling a man to call you sir while you have your boot on his neck. Wukong will spend several chapters fishing for this word.

The economy of his phrasing is worth noticing. Save a few syllables, he says, as though the demon were running up a bill. He has turned an act of worship into a transaction and then complained about the price.