Eight Rules said: "Good obedient son, that is exactly how it should be put.

兒子: 兒 the person-morpheme ér, not the diminutive suffix er. 好乖兒子 is mock-paternal abuse — Bajie's habitual manoeuvre of assigning himself the senior generation.

Now mind the rake."

仔細 is read zǐ xì; pypinyin's default zǎi is wrong. This is the first occurrence of 仔 in the arc, and the reading is fixed here.

The fiend said: "So you are a monk who left the world halfway along the road."

半路上出家, "to take orders midway" — an idiom for a late or amateur convert, and here a jibe at Bajie's origins as a heavenly marshal turned hog.

Eight Rules said: "My son, you really have some numinous perception about you. How did you know at once that I left the world halfway?"

靈感 is turned back on the demon, whose assumed style it is. 曉得 得 dé; 我的兒 兒 ér.

The fiend said: "You know how to handle a rake — I suppose you were hired somewhere to till a garden, and made off with the man's muck-rake."

那裡 here is indefinite, "somewhere," and is read with the interrogative series, 那 nǎ, rather than as the deictic "there." 種園: 種 zhòng, the verb "to plant, to till," not the nominal zhǒng ("seed"). 拐將來 將 jiāng, directional.

Eight Rules said: "Son, this rake of mine is no earth-breaking rake such as you mean.

那築地之鈀: 那 anaphoric nà, pointing back at the demon's supposition. The 維基文庫 text opens this speech without the 「 used elsewhere; the punctuation is modern editorial and is left as it stands.

Look:

你看 with the colon — the verse-tag. The six couplets that follow are the rake's pedigree, and prose and verse form a single passage.

Great teeth cast like the claws of a dragon; / bright-plated, it takes the shape of a python.

遜金妝來: 妝 "adorned, plated." The compound 遜金 is obscure and appears to denote a gilding or inlay; the 世德堂本 form is encoded as it stands. 似 sì.

Should it meet a foe, a cold wind scatters abroad; / let it come to grips, and flames spring up.

相持: 相 xiāng, mutual — "to be locked together." The two lines answer the demon's own weather-magic with weather of the rake's making.

It can rid the holy monk of monsters, / and take fiends along the westward road.

與 in the sense of 為, "on behalf of." The middle couplet grounds the boast in office: the rake is an instrument of the pilgrimage, not a private weapon.

Swung, it stirs mist and cloud to blot out sun and moon; / plied, it opens a rosy light that shows all clear.

分明 分 fēn. The couplet is built on a reversal — first darkness, then illumination — which is the standard shape of these weapon-panegyrics.

Rake down Mount Tai, and a thousand tigers quail; / overturn the great sea, and ten thousand dragons start.

築倒: 倒 dǎo, "to topple" — distinct from the adversative dào of 我倒不曾吃你 in the preceding block. 太山 = 泰山.

Grant that your numinous power has arts of its own — / one stroke of this rake will open nine holes in you."

九窟窿, nine holes, one for each tooth of the rake. 須教: 教 jiào, causative. The verse ends where the boast began, on the number nine.