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 way of saying "evenly matched," a fixed unit of narrative time rather than a count. 不分勝敗 takes 分 as fēn, "to divide, to settle."

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 trick, learnt back in chapter 2. The 世德堂本 puts the phrase in quotation marks itself, treating it as a technical term.

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

The hairs have to be chewed, not merely pulled: 嚼 takes jiáo by the chapter 15 ruling, and 得 here marks that the chewing succeeds. It is worth noticing that the trick costs him a piece of his own body every time he uses it.

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 the ordinary adverb dōu here, against the dū of 都總帥 two passages back — same character, different office. And 百十個 does not mean a hundred and ten; it is the vernacular for "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;

This is the mechanism of the whole chapter, and it is not magic in the ordinary sense. 巽 (xùn) is the fifth trigram of the 易, and its image is wind: 巽為風. The fiend does not conjure a wind out of nothing. He turns to face the quarter that wind comes from, and breathes. 吹將出去 takes 將 as jiāng, and the 著 of 望著 is zhe, an orientation held.

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 announcement, and it stays in the prose. What follows is the longest single block of verse in the chapter by a wide margin — twenty-four units and three hundred and thirty-nine characters, twenty-three of them running to a regular fourteen and the last breaking the pattern.

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

The poem opens with two doubled-up sound-words, 冷冷颼颼 and 無影無形, and between them they set its method: you hear this wind before you see it, and you never see it at all — only what it has done.

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 odd compound: 坫 is properly a raised earthen stand, borrowed here for the shoulder of a ridge.

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

Both rivers are chosen for what it takes to spoil them. 徹底渾 — the Yellow River is already yellow, so nothing short of stirring it to the riverbed would register. The Xiang is the clear river of the south, and Qu Yuan's river besides.

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 of the Dipper, paired with 牛, the Ox. 森羅殿 is King Yama's courtroom in the underworld. 爭些 is vernacular for "very nearly" — the wind came within an inch of flattening hell's administration.

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

Here the poem turns into a catalogue, and it runs for eighteen couplets, from this line to the one that blows down Guanyin's twelve courts. The order is deliberate: Buddhist first, then Daoist, then the popular gods, then the underworld.

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

The green-maned lion belongs to Mañjuśrī and the white elephant to Samantabhadra, the two great bodhisattvas who stand either side of Śākyamuni. Both animals turn up later in this novel as escaped mounts making trouble on their own account, which puts a joke in this line that only a second reading finds.

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 a tortoise and a snake. 梓橦 is Zitong — that is, 文昌帝君, the god of letters and of examinations — who rides a mule. And then the wonderfully exact word: 韂 (chàn) is the 障泥, the flap that hangs below the saddle to keep the mud off. It is written with the leather radical, and it is a very precise thing 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 without warning from gods to working men, and the two trades it picks are the two most exposed to weather. 拜許諸般願 — they bow and promise the gods absolutely anything.

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

And then, buried in the middle of a comic inventory, the poem's one serious couplet. 名利殘生 is what remains of a life spent chasing reputation and gain, and the water simply disposes of it. It is placed exactly where a reader would not think to look for a moral.

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 doubled-up colloquial adjectives, dropped into a poem otherwise built almost entirely out of proper nouns.

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

This is the pattern of the whole catalogue in one line: every god loses precisely the thing that identifies him. The Star of Longevity has to put away his 龍鬚扇, the dragon-whisker fan — the wind has made his own instrument ridiculous.

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

釧 are the bangles worn at the waist. The Queen Mother of the West is on her way to the very peach banquet the Pilgrim wrecked in chapter 5; the wind now does to her roughly 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, by the chapter 17 ruling. Both halves are aimed: Erlang, who could not be escaped in chapter 6, now cannot find his own home city, and Nezha, whose sword is practically an extension of his arm, cannot get it out of the case.

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 Heavenly King who carries a pagoda on his palm — and cannot see it. 吊 is diào, "let drop." Lu Ban is the patron of carpenters, so his drill is the tool behind every made thing there is.

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

雷音寶闕 is the Thunderclap Monastery, the destination of the whole journey, and 趙州石橋 is the great Sui-dynasty arch at Zhaozhou, the most admired piece of engineering in the empire. One couplet, and the wind has touched both.

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 leaves people behind and turns on the sky itself. 斗 is again dǒu, here inside 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 dislocation, with no god in them at all. The poem is clearing itself of names before it closes.

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, the reciprocal "each other." 子母 is zǐ mǔ, a fixed pair. After the gods and the merchants, the birds and the beasts.

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

The joke keeps its shape even down here: each figure loses the subordinate he is defined by working with. The Dragon King has mislaid his 夜叉 — read yè chā, the standing transcription of the Sanskrit — and the Duke of Thunder cannot find his Lightning, who in popular religion is his partner and works the flash while he works the noise.

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

十代閻王 are the ten kings who preside over the ten courts of the underworld, and the 判官 is their clerk: without him nothing can be entered in the record. Ox-Head and Horse-Face are hell's two constables, and the wind has reduced them to chasing each other.

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

倒 is dǎo again. Potalaka is Guanyin's island, and the wind reaches her at last — and what it takes from her is a sutra. That is the scripture handed to Sanzang in the previous chapter.

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 finishes on the bodhisattva who sent the pilgrims down this road in the first place, which is the entire point of finishing there.

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

盤古 is Pangu, who split heaven from earth at the beginning of things. 似 is corrected to sì; since both candidate readings are fourth tone, the 不 in front needs no tone adjustment — which is a thing worth checking rather than assuming, since a corrected reading often does force one.

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

The one unit that breaks the pattern: seventeen characters against the twenty-three regular fourteens before it. 唿喇喇 is pure noise (喇 as lǎ, per the chapter 16 rule), and 乾坤 takes qián kūn. The trap here is 險不炸崩開: the 不 is doing no work at all — 險不 means "all but," not "did not." 都 is the adverb dōu.