There I was “once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary” as I read a quaint and curious essay about a forgotten lore. It was about Kou-Sze, who faced either a death sentence or life in prison for killing a reprehensible person in Northern China. However, his influential friend was able to have the court reduce his sentence to eight years. While Kou-Sze began serving his time, he looked out his window and noticed a group of monkeys in the trees. It wasn’t long before he could identify each monkey as they would fight. Over the months and years, Kou Sze noticed that it was similar to the Tei Tong style of kung fu. He could grasp five different fighting styles: the Tall Monkey, the Lost Monkey, the Wooden Monkey, the Stone Monkey, and the Drunken Monkey.

Kou Sze named his five techniques style as a means to pay tribute to Sūn Wùkōng, the famous Monkey King in the ancient folklore story Journey to the West. The story is about the Monkey King, who discovered the spiritual peach tree.

The Monkey King and the Peach Tree

As the story goes, the Monkey King gets drunk on the peaches from the tree. As a result, he made a mess of the Heavenly Palace while fighting with the army of Heaven. Finally, the Buddha Yu-le that stopped the Monkey King.

That is the backstory. Robert Dudley of the University of California at Berkeley authored The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. He developed a scientific hypothesis that Dudley suggests humans can get drunk due to our ancestral primates. According to Dudley, due to the long evolutionally primary development, monkeys and other animals were attracted to various fruits for food.

Our forebearers would eat the fruit from the tree or vine. However, they also scavenged for fruit that had fallen to the ground. As the fruit started to ferment, it would create ethanol. Dudley hypothesizes that humans inherited from our ancestors' taste for alcohol due to the fermenting fruit.

My family tree must have developed in areas of blackberries. I’m not into beers. If someone offers me a beer, I’ll drink it. I don’t have any beer in my home. The only liquor I have is rum, which I use for banana flambeau on special occasions, like when I am with my family in Myanmar. I call it Banana's Bo Bo Gyi in honor of the Theravada Buddhist nat.

The rum is burnt off on those occasions before the bananas and cinnamon sauce go over vanilla ice cream.

Actually, the only wine that I drink is Blackberry Merlot. Apparently, my family evolved around fields of blackberry bushes somewhere in Africa.

Blackberries

---

These videos are links to monkeys and other animals getting drunk over various fruits.

This is a National Geographic video on drunk monkeys.

This is a BBC video.

This video is of drunk African animals getting drunk on fruit.