From Hanuman to Goku: How an Indian Monkey God Echoes Through Anime
Goku cosplayers at MCM London Comic Con, May 2016. Photo: Altan Dilan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
It started, as most of my assignments do, as a post-midnight Wikipedia spiral in my Banani mess;one episode of Dragon Ball Super buffering on GP 3G, and suddenly I was reading about the Monkey King. What I found genuinely surprised me, so I thought I would write it up properly: some of the most recognisable heroes in anime appear to share an ancestor in Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana. The line runs from ancient India through China to Japan. Allow me to trace it.
1. Hanuman: The Original Template
For readers who grew up, as I did, hearing the Ramayana from grandparents during load-shedding evenings;Hanuman needs little introduction. He is the vanara hero of the epic: enormously strong, capable of flight, able to expand his body to gigantic size, and most famously the lifter of the entire Sanjeevani mountain to save Lakshmana. Just as important as the powers is the personality;fierce loyalty to Rama, mischief, humour, and complete sincerity.
What struck me, reading it back with fresh eyes in my second year, is how closely this maps onto the modern shonen protagonist: overwhelming power paired with innocence. Toriyama and Kishimoto did not invent this formula. It is at least two thousand years old.
Hanuman carrying the Sanjeevani mountain to save Lakshmana — print from the Picture Ramayana, c. 1916 (public domain).
2. The Transmission: India to China to Japan
Our South Asian history courses skim over this, so let me lay out the standard account:
- India: The Ramayana establishes Hanuman as the archetypal monkey hero.
- China: Over centuries, Indian narratives travel eastward along trade routes with Buddhist monks and merchants. China eventually produces its own synthesis, the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, whose hero is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. A substantial body of scholarship holds that Sun Wukong absorbed traits from Hanuman;cloud travel, the transforming staff, prodigious strength, and the trickster-devotee character.
- Japan: The Chinese tale enters Japanese literature and theatre, where Sun Wukong is read as Son Goku. Post-war manga and anime creators then build directly on that figure.
A necessary qualification, since my history professor would demand one: the Hanuman–Wukong link is a widely held scholarly position, not an uncontested fact. The Wukong–Goku link, by contrast, is documented;the creators themselves have acknowledged it.
Sun Wukong, the Monkey King — 19th-century Chinese illustration for Journey to the West (public domain).
3. Dragon Ball: The Documented Case
Dragon Ball is the clearest link in the chain, because Akira Toriyama began it quite openly as a loose adaptation of Journey to the West. Anyone who has seen the early volumes;pillaf-era, 1980s material that we mostly caught on YouTube in terrible resolution;will recognise the inventory:
- The tail: Goku is born with a monkey's tail, marking him as liminal;neither fully human nor fully beast. The parallel with the vanara is difficult to miss.
- The staff: The Nyoi-bo (Power Pole), extending at will, is a direct rendering of Sun Wukong's Ruyi Jingu Bang;itself conceptually downstream of Hanuman's gada.
- The cloud: The Flying Nimbus (Kinto'un) parallels Wukong's cloud-somersault, and both recall Hanuman's leap across the strait to Lanka;still one of the great set-pieces of world literature.
- The appetite: Goku's bottomless hunger has an exact precedent in Hanuman's infancy myth;attempting to swallow the sun, mistaking it for a mango.
- The ape form: The Oozaru transformation under the full moon literalises what was always implicit: the god breaking through the boy.
Z and Super have obviously carried Goku far from these origins. But the architecture underneath;tail, staff, cloud, metamorphosis;is still visible to anyone looking for it.
Super Saiyan Blue Goku cosplayer at New York Comic Con, October 2016 — the Dragon Ball Super era. Photo: istolethetv / Wikimedia Commons.
4. Naruto's Son Goku
The second data point is in Naruto Shippuden: the Four-Tails is explicitly named Son Goku, King of the Sage Monkeys;a colossal red ape wielding lava release, sealed within Roshi. Kishimoto's borrowing is undisguised; the name alone settles it.
Consider what that means: the two best-selling manga franchises of the modern era both contain a Son Goku. This is not coincidence or parallel invention. It is one archetype, transmitted across three civilisations.
Naruto cosplayers at Comic World Taiwan, August 2015. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
5. Saiyuki and the Wider Pattern
For the most faithful adaptation, see Kazuya Minekura's Saiyuki (Gensomaden Saiyuki);a monk escorted westward by the monkey boy Son Goku and two companions, fighting demons across a mythic geography. It follows the bones of Journey to the West far more closely than Toriyama ever did.
And beyond the direct adaptations, the Hanuman pattern recurs throughout the genre:
- Heroes who expand to gigantic scale or transform in rage;Hanuman's vishvarupa-like growth, secularised.
- Strength absorbed through food;Senzu Beans, soldier pills;a folk logic in which divine power is literally ingested.
- Intelligent beast companions, from ninja hounds to flying cats, continuing a convention the Ramayana's vanara army arguably founded: animals as soldiers and counsellors rather than pets.
Cosplayers as the Saiyuki main cast — Genjo Sanzo, Son Goku, Cho Hakkai and Sha Gojyo. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
6. Why Japan Was Receptive
What made this import stick, I think, is that Japan already possessed its own simian folklore. The three wise monkeys of the Nikko Toshogu shrine, mountain monkey deities, the saru as messenger and agricultural protector;audiences were predisposed to take a monkey hero seriously. The imported Monkey King fused with indigenous tradition instead of displacing it, which is why monkey figures remain so dense across Japanese games and anime, from Tekken to Pokemon's Primeape and Infernape lines.
It is a useful reminder, sitting in a Dhaka classroom in 2016 arguing about whether soft power flows only from West to East: here is a current running the opposite way;South Asia to East Asia;centuries before anyone coined the term.
The three wise monkeys at Nikko Tosho-gu shrine, Japan — photographed July 2010. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
7. Conclusion
Laid end to end, the sequence is genuinely remarkable: a deity from an ancient Indian epic contributes to a Chinese trickster god, who becomes a Japanese television icon, who in turn shapes the childhoods of viewers from Dhaka to Dallas. Three millennia of storytelling, one continuous tail.
I will leave the final verification to the scholars. But the shape of the transmission seems to me unmistakable;and worth knowing the next time Goku takes to his cloud.
Sources
- Dragon Ball (manga/anime);Akira Toriyama; early volumes adapt Journey to the West (tail, staff, flying cloud).
- Naruto Shippuden;Masashi Kishimoto; the Four-Tails is named Son Goku, King of the Sage Monkeys.
- Gensomaden Saiyuki;Kazuya Minekura; direct adaptation of Journey to the West.
- Ramayana;Hanuman, the vanara army, the leap to Lanka, the Sanjeevani mountain.
- Journey to the West (16th-century Chinese novel, tr. Anthony C. Yu);Sun Wukong; the bridge between the Indian and Japanese traditions.
Street samurai blogger since 2011. Writes about synths, netrunning, anime & dial-up dreams. Currently online via cybercafe in Night City. Leave a comment or sign the guestbook!
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