The old fiend and the Great Sage fought through thirty bouts, and neither victory nor defeat was settled.

鬥經三十回合 — thirty bouts is the conventional measure of an even match. 不分勝敗 takes 分 as fēn, "to divide, to determine."

The Pilgrim, wanting to show some feat, employed the art called the body-beyond-the-body:

身外身, "a body outside the body," is the Pilgrim's signature multiplication, learnt in chapter 2. The graphs are put in quotation marks by the 世德堂本 itself, as a term of art.

he plucked a handful of hairs from his hide, chewed them to fragments in his mouth, blew them upward, and cried, "Change!"

嚼 takes jiáo (the ch15 ruling), and 得 the resultative de. The hairs must be chewed, not merely plucked: the transformation costs him something of his own body each time.

They changed into a hundred and more Pilgrims, all in the same array, each gripping an iron rod, and they ringed the fiend about in the air.

都 is here the adverb dōu, against the dū of 都總帥 two passages earlier. 百十個 is not a hundred and ten but "a hundred or so."

The fiend took fright, and used an art of his own. Turning his head quickly, he faced toward the quarter of Xun, opened his mouth three times, and blew out a single breath with a huff;

巽 (xùn) is the fifth trigram of the 易, whose image is wind — 巽為風. The fiend does not conjure a wind; he faces the direction from which wind is, and breathes. 吹將出去 takes 將 as jiāng. 著 in 望著 is zhe, a directed orientation maintained.

and of a sudden a yellow gale sprang up out of the empty sky. A fine wind it was, and truly terrible:

好風，真個利害： is the verse lead-in and stays in the prose. What follows is the longest single verse block in the novel so far — twenty-four units, three hundred and thirty-nine graphs.

Chill and soughing, heaven and earth were changed; / shadowless, formless, the yellow sand went round.

The rhapsody opens with two reduplicated binomes, 冷冷颼颼 and 無影無形, which set its whole method: sound before sight, and the wind known only by what it does.

It pierced the woods, snapped the ridges, laid pine and plum flat; / it scattered the soil, flung up the dust, brought the crags down.

倒 reads dǎo, "to fall, to be laid flat." 嶺坫 is an unusual compound — 坫 is properly a raised earthen stand, here the shoulder of a ridge.

Yellow River billows dashed and were muddied to the bed; / Xiang River waters surged and turned their waves over.

徹底渾: the Yellow River is already yellow, so the wind must muddy it to the very bed to disturb it at all. The Xiang is the clear river of the south, and Qu Yuan's.

The blue sky shook in the palace of the Dipper and the Ox; / it all but blew the Hall of Judgment over.

斗牛宮 takes 斗 as dǒu, the lunar mansion (the Dipper), paired with 牛 (the Ox). 森羅殿 is King Yama's judgment hall. 爭些 is vernacular for "very nearly."

Five hundred arhats raised a clamour to heaven; / the eight great vajra-guardians shouted all together in confusion.

The rhapsody now begins its catalogue: from this line to the twenty-second, the whole Chinese pantheon is blown about in strict order — Buddhist first, then Daoist, then popular, then the underworld.

Mañjuśrī's green-maned lion ran off; / Samantabhadra's white elephant was nowhere to be found.

The lion of Mañjuśrī and the white elephant of Samantabhadra are the mounts of the two great bodhisattvas who flank Śākyamuni. Both will appear again in this novel as escaped beasts, which lends the line a joke that only rereading discloses.

Zhenwu's tortoise and snake lost their company; / Zitong's mule had its saddle-flap blown loose.

真武 is the Dark Warrior of the north, whose emblems are the tortoise and the snake. 梓橦 is Zitong, i.e. 文昌帝君, the god of letters, who rides a mule. 韂 (chàn, U+97C2) is the 障泥, the flap hung below the saddle to keep off mud — a graph of the leather radical, and a very precise word to reach for in a poem about wind.

Travelling merchants cried aloud and appealed to blue heaven; / boatmen bowed low and vowed every vow they had.

The catalogue drops abruptly from gods to men, and the two trades named are those most exposed to weather. 拜許諸般願 — they promise the gods anything.

Life on the misted waves went adrift in the surge; / the last of fame and profit was settled by the water.

名利殘生: what is left of a life spent on reputation and gain, and the water disposes of it. The couplet is the moral centre of the rhapsody, and it is placed where a reader would least look for one.

The immortals' hills and grotto-courts were black and dim; / the sea-isle of Penglai lay dark and dull.

黑攸攸 and 昏暗暗 are reduplicated adjectives of the vernacular register, dropped into a poem otherwise built of proper nouns.

Laozi could scarcely mind his elixir furnace; / the Star of Longevity put away his dragon-whisker fan.

龍鬚扇, the fan of dragon-whiskers: the Star of Longevity has to put it away, since the wind has made his own instrument absurd. This is the rhapsody's characteristic joke — each deity is embarrassed by the loss of exactly the thing that defines him.

The Queen Mother, riding out to the peach feast, / had skirt and waist-bangles blown into disorder.

釧 are the bangles at the waist. The Queen Mother of the West is on her way to the very peach banquet the Pilgrim ruined in chapter 5; the wind now does to her what he did.

Erlang lost his way to the city of Guanzhou; / Nezha could not draw the sword out of its case.

哪吒 reads né zhā (the ch17 ruling). Erlang, who could not be escaped in chapter 6, cannot now find his own city; Nezha, whose sword is his hand, cannot draw it.

The Heavenly King could not see the pagoda on his palm; / Lu Ban let fall his gold-headed drill.

天王 is Li Jing, the pagoda-bearing Heavenly King. 吊 is diào, "let drop." Lu Ban is the patron of carpenters, and his drill is the instrument of all making.

The precious towers of Thunderclap sank three storeys; / the stone bridge of Zhaozhou broke in two.

雷音寶闕 is the Thunderclap Monastery at the journey's end, and 趙州石橋 the great Sui-dynasty arch at Zhaozhou. The wind touches the pilgrimage's destination and the empire's most famous piece of engineering in one couplet.

The one wheel of the red sun was tossed and lost its light; / the stars that filled the sky were all thrown into disorder.

The catalogue turns from persons to the cosmos itself. 斗 is again dǒu, here in 星斗, "the stars."

Birds of the southern hills flew off to the northern hills; / waters of the eastern lake spilled over into the western.

Two lines of pure derangement of place, with no god in them at all. The rhapsody is preparing its close by emptying itself of names.

Cock and hen, torn from their pairs, called to each other no more; / dam and young, driven apart, could scarcely cry out.

相 reads xiāng, reciprocal. 子母 is zǐ mǔ, lexical. After the gods and the merchants, the birds and beasts.

The Dragon King searched the whole sea for his yakṣa; / the Duke of Thunder hunted everywhere for his Lightning.

夜叉 reads yè chā, the standing transcription. Ox-Head and Horse-Face are the two constables of hell, and the wind reduces them to chasing one another.

The ten kings of the underworld sought after their judge; / in the earth-prison Ox-Head chased after Horse-Face.

十代閻王: the ten kings who preside over the courts of the underworld. The 判官 is their clerk, and without him nothing can be recorded.

This wind blew Mount Potalaka over, / and rolled up a scroll of Guanyin's sutra.

倒 again dǎo. Potalaka is Guanyin's island; the wind reaches her at last, and what it takes from her is a sutra — the very text of chapter 19.

White lotus blossoms were stripped away and flew along the shore; / it blew the Bodhisattva's twelve courts down.

十二院, the twelve courts of Guanyin's establishment. The catalogue ends with the bodhisattva who has sent the pilgrims on this road, which is the point.

From Pangu's day to this a wind has been seen indeed, / but never a wind that came so ill as this.

盤古 split heaven from earth. 似 is corrected to sì; both readings are fourth tone, so the preceding 不 needs no sandhi override — a case worth checking rather than assuming.

Hu-la-la! — heaven and earth were within a hair of bursting asunder, / and ten thousand lǐ of rivers and hills together shook.

The single irregular unit of the rhapsody: seventeen graphs against the twenty-three regular fourteens before it. 唿喇喇 is onomatopoeia (喇 as lǎ, per the ch16 rule). 乾坤 takes qián kūn. In 險不炸崩開 the 不 is pleonastic — 險不 means "all but," not "did not." 都 is the adverb dōu.