玉帝發兵 The Jade Emperor Sends His Troops
逐句解 Line by line
The Jade Emperor, enquiring and learning what powers I had, / straightway sent out the celestial troops and drew up the field of battle.
訪 here is "to make enquiry about," not "to visit." The couplet opens the war section of the poem, which runs to the furnace.
The Nine Luminaries, those baleful stars, were put down by me; / the fierce mansions of the five quarters took hurt at my hands.
五方兇宿: 宿 = xiù, the lunar mansion — the third reading of this graph to appear in the chapter, after xiǔ (安眠一宿) and against the carried sù. 九曜 are the nine luminaries: sun, moon, the five planets and the two eclipse-points.
Not one of heaven's generals was a match for me; / a host of a hundred thousand dared not stand against me.
神將: 將 = jiàng here (the rank, "general"), against the jiāng of the disposal coverb three couplets above. 不敢當: 當 = dāng ("to withstand").
I pressed the Jade Emperor hard, till he passed down his decree, / and the Little Sage of Guanjiang mustered up his levies.
灌江小聖 is Erlang, the Illustrious Sage of Guanjiang Mouth, the Jade Emperor's nephew — summoned in Chapter 6 when the regular armies failed.
We held one another through seventy-two transformations, / each plying his spirit, and each of us strong.
相持: 相 = xiāng, mutual. 七十單二變 — the seventy-two transformations, the count Subodhi taught him and the exact measure of the duel with Erlang, who had the same number.
Guanyin of the South Sea came to help the fight; / her pure vase and willow spray gave their aid as well.
觀音: 觀 = guān; 相幫: 相 = xiāng. In Chapter 6 the vase is what she proposes to throw, and Lord Lao talks her out of it — which is how the next couplet comes about.
Then Lord Lao brought his diamond snare to bear, / and took me captive to the region above.
金剛套 — the diamond snare: Lord Lao's ring, the weapon that finally brought Wukong down in Chapter 6. This is the hinge of the whole chapter, and Pilgrim says it himself, in a boast, without hearing it.
Bound, I was brought before the Jade Emperor, the Great Emperor Zhang; / the clerks of the court examined me, and the crime was judged to merit death.
罪該當: 當 = dāng ("to be fitting"). 張大帝 reflects the popular identification of the Jade Emperor with a sovereign surnamed Zhang; 曹官 are the clerks of the celestial departments, and 拷較 is judicial examination under torture.
At once the Strong-Arm was dispatched to strike off my head; / the blade came down on the skin of my skull in a flash of flame.
即差: 差 = chāi ("to dispatch on a commission"), not chà. 大力 is the Strong-Arm Devarāja, the executioner detailed in Chapter 7.
By a hundred devices and a thousand means they could not make me die; / so they marched me off to Lord Lao's hall.
將吾押赴: 將 = jiāng, disposal. The line compresses the sword, the fire and the thunder of Chapter 7 into four graphs.
In the furnace of the Six Ding's divine fire I was smelted; / smelted till my whole body was hard as steel.
爐中: 中 = zhōng; 煉得: 得 = de, the complement marker. 硬似鋼: 似 = sì (GLOBAL_PY). The Six Ding are the spirit-officers who tend the Eight Trigram Crucible.
The war section runs eleven couplets and keeps strict chronological order: the Jade Emperor's enquiry, the regular armies, the Nine Luminaries and the star-mansions, the hundred thousand, Erlang, Guanyin, the capture, the trial, the executioner, the furnace. It is Chapters 5 to 7 in miniature, and as verse it is competent rather than brilliant — the interest is in what it lets slip.
The seventh couplet is the chapter's hinge, and it goes by at speed: 老君又使金剛套, "then Lord Lao brought his diamond snare to bear, and took me captive." Wukong is boasting to a demon whose ring has just swallowed his cudgel, six celestial weapons and an entire fire-armoury, and he is telling him, in the middle of a list of his own defeats, that a ring belonging to Lord Lao once did exactly this to him. He does not hear it. The answer to the chapter's problem is in his own mouth, in a poem he is reciting as a threat, and it will take a journey to the Thunderclap Monastery and a hint from the Tathāgata before anyone connects the two. The narrator says nothing. He simply lets the couplet pass and waits for the reader to notice.