水底鏖戰 The Battle on the Riverbed
那妖邪不容分說，三家變臉，這一場在水底下好殺：那妖邪不容分说，三家变脸，这一场在水底下好杀：
逐句解 Line by line
The fiend would hear no more of it. The three of them changed countenance, and here was a fine slaughter beneath the water:
不容分說, allowing no word of explanation. 三家, the three parties; 好殺 with the colon opens the battle-rhapsody, which runs to a hundred and ninety-one characters — the longest verse unit in the chapter.
Copper mallet, precious staff, and iron-toothed rake; / Wuneng and Wujing at war with the fiend.
The verse opens on the religious names, 悟能 and 悟淨, where the prose throughout uses the nicknames. The shift of register is deliberate: what follows is not a brawl but a doctrinal diagram.
The one, Heavenly Reeds come down into the world; / the other, a Senior General descended to the sky's edge.
天蓬 is Bajie's celestial office, Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds; 上將 is Sha Monk, formerly Curtain-Raising Captain — 將 read jiàng as a rank. 降天涯: 降 jiàng, "to descend," against the xiáng of 降妖 in the preceding passage.
Those two press the water-monster from either side in a show of arms; / this one alone withstands the holy monks, and his force is worth the praise.
The lines lengthen to ten characters each, loosening the metre where the fighting thickens. 夾攻, the pincer attack.
Having the portion and having the affinity, they will attain the Great Way; / begetting and overcoming by turns, they hold to sands past number.
有分: 分 read fèn, the noun "allotted portion," not fēn. 相生相剋 is the Five Phases doctrine of mutual production and mutual conquest, 相 xiāng. 恆沙, the sands of the Ganges, the Buddhist figure for the uncountable.
Earth overcomes water, and the water dries to show its bed;
乾 read gān, "dry" — pypinyin defaults to qián, the trigram name. The drop to three-character lines marks the turn from narration into the Five Phases catalogue.
water begets wood, and the wood grows rank and flowers.
生 and 剋 are the two relations of the Five Phases cycle — production and conquest — and the rhapsody sets one line of each side by side.
Chan practice, investigated and cultivated, returns to a single body; / the Reverted Elixir, roasted and refined, subdues the three houses.
參 cān, to investigate a teaching. 還丹 huán dān, the Reverted Cinnabar of inner alchemy — 還 the verb huán, not the adverb hái. 炮 read páo, "to roast in the crucible," not pào.
Earth is the mother, and puts out the golden sprout; metal begets the divine water, which brings forth the infant;
金芽 and 嬰娃 (= 嬰兒) are technical terms of inner alchemy for stages of the elixir's formation. The vocabulary belongs to the Quanzhen tradition and is used throughout the novel's verse.
water is the root, and moistens the flowering wood; wood holds a blaze of fierce and fiery light.
水為本: 為 wéi, the copula "is" — distinct from the purposive wèi of 為釋迦 five couplets below. 木華: 華 read huā, the classical equivalent of 花 — a concrete botanical noun in strict parallel with the 金芽 of the preceding line (golden sprout ∥ wood's bloom); both fit the 麻-rhyme, and the syntax decides for the noun.
The Five Phases gathered close are each of them distinct; / and so their faces alter, each at variance with the rest.
攢簇 cuán cù, "to gather in a cluster" — an inner-alchemical term for concentrating the Five Phases, with 攢 cuán against pypinyin's zǎn. 爭差 is a Yuan-Ming vernacular compound for discrepancy or mishap, taken here with the nominal 差 chā rather than the verbal chà.
Look at that copper mallet — nine petals, bright and fine; / the precious staff with its thousand threads of coloured broidery.
看他那 is an internal presentational inside an ongoing verse run; by the standing rule it stays within the verse and does not open a new showcase. 那 deictic nà.
The rake, ordered by yin and yang, is parcelled among the Nine Luminaries; / not knowing the moves, all is as tangled as hemp.
九曜, the Nine Luminaries of the calendar. 解數 is read xiè shù, a set of martial moves — the reading preserved in 渾身解數; pypinyin gives jiě. 數 shù, nominal.
They give up the body and cast away life because of the monk's peril; / they abandon death and forget living for the sake of Śākya.
僧難: 難 nàn, the noun "calamity." 為釋迦: 為 wèi, purposive — the same graph read wéi four couplets above.
So the copper mallet is kept busy and never falls slack, / warding off the staff on the left and the rake on the right.
忙不墜, busy without let-up. The rhapsody ends where a scorecard would: the demon holding off two weapons at once, and neither side gaining.
This is the formal centre of the chapter, and it does something the prose cannot: it reads the fight as a diagram. After four couplets of ordinary battle-description the metre breaks down into three- and four-character lines and the vocabulary changes entirely — 相生相剋, 土剋水, 水生木, 還丹, 金芽, 嬰娃, 攢簇五行. These are the terms of inner alchemy as the Quanzhen tradition uses them, and the novel deploys them regularly in its verse to assert that the pilgrimage is an alchemical process worked out in narrative.
The doctrine is not decoration here. Two water-natured pilgrims are fighting a water demon in his own element, and the verse states the relation that would settle it — 土剋水, earth overcomes water — which is precisely what none of the three combatants can supply. The rhapsody closes on a stalemate, the mallet holding off staff and rake at once, and the chapter will have to look outside the party for its answer. One point of technique: the 看他那 in the eleventh couplet is an internal presentational, inside an ongoing verse run rather than opening a new one, and it stays within the passage.