Stealing the Manfruit

A monk is walking from China to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures, and because the road is full of monsters he has been given three disciples to protect him: Sun Wukong (Sūn Wùkōng), a monkey who once fought all of Heaven and lost; Zhu Bajie (Zhū Bājiè), half man and half pig, who thinks mostly about his next meal; and Sha Wujing (Shā Wùjìng), who carries the luggage. The monk himself is gentle, strict about the rules, and no use at all in a fight.

Halfway up a mountain they stop at a Daoist abbey. In its back garden stands a tree that flowers once in three thousand years, fruits three thousand years after that, and ripens three thousand years later still - and its fruit are shaped exactly like newborn babies, with arms and legs and faces, kicking and turning their heads on the branch. Eat one and you live forty-seven thousand years. Daoist immortals and Buddhist monks are rival professions here, polite to each other in public; the abbey's master and this monk happen to be old acquaintances from five hundred years ago.

The master has just been called up to Heaven to hear a lecture. He leaves two boy attendants in charge, both of them over a thousand years old, with one instruction: give the monk two fruit - and don't let his disciples find out.