His true self sent forth a divided spirit; springing onto a cloud-head, he leapt up and away and made straight for the ginseng garden. Drawing the gold-banded cudgel, he dealt the tree a resounding blow—ping! pang!—and then, calling up the strength to push over mountains and shift ranges, he set his shoulder to the tree and toppled it clean over.

出一個神, chū yí gè shén, is sending a spirit out of the body so that the real self can act while the decoy sits still. 縱雲頭, zòng yún tóu, is springing up onto a cloud. The blow lands with a plain 乒乓, pīng pāng; then comes 推山移嶺, tuī shān yí lǐng, "push over mountains and shift the ranges," a stock phrase for enormous strength.

Pitiful!—the leaves fell, the boughs split wide, the roots were heaved from the soil, and the Daoists' herb of the reverted elixir was cut off at the source.

The narrator stops the prose here and drops into two balanced seven-character lines, cued by 可憐, kě lián — "the pity of it." 草還丹, cǎo huán dān, is the tree's alchemical name, the "herb of the reverted elixir": 還丹, huán dān, is cinnabar cycled through the furnace and brought back purified, the great prize of Daoist alchemy. So 還 is huán, "to return," not the everyday adverb hái. Giving the tree its loftiest title at the exact moment it falls is the storyteller twisting the knife.

Once the Great Sage had toppled the tree, he searched the branches for the fruit—but where was there to be found even half a one?

Two 那 in one sentence, read two different ways. 那大聖 is nà, "that," simply pointing. 那裡得有半個 is nǎ, a question used as a flat denial — "where would there be even half a one?" meaning there were none — with 得 as dé, "could." Modern Chinese splits these between 那 and 哪; Ming printing let one character do both jobs.

For it turned out that these treasures drop at the touch of metal; and as both ends of his cudgel are sheathed in gold—and iron, besides, belongs to the five metals—so at a blow they were shaken down; and once down, meeting earth, they sank straight into it.

This is the chapter's bit of invented physics, and it is worked out with real care. The fruit's rule is 遇金而落, yù jīn ér luò, "meets metal and falls," and once down, 遇土而入, it sinks into earth. Wukong's cudgel is capped with gold at both ends, and iron counts among the 五金, wǔ jīn, the five metals: gold, silver, copper, iron and tin. So every blow both shakes fruit loose and dooms it. This is the 五行 system of five agents applied as engineering. 敲著 takes 著 as zhe, marking the action in progress.

And so on the ground above there was left not a single fruit.

上邊, shàng biān, "up above" — the tree and the surface of the ground, as against everything now swallowed underneath.

He said, "Good, good, good!

The triple 好 is Wukong's tic when something has gone exactly as badly as he wanted. Listen for it again when the lacquer comes out.

"Now let everyone's fire die down."

散火, sàn huǒ, is colloquial for breaking up a gathering and letting the heat go out of a quarrel: show's over, everyone go home. He says it having just made the quarrel unfixable.

He put away the iron cudgel, came straight back to the front, gave the hair a shake, and drew it up onto his body once more.

One shake and the decoy is a hair again, back on his body. Every hair-transformation ends this way; it is the magic's tidying-up.

Those others, with their fleshly eyes and mortal frames, saw nothing of it clearly.

肉眼凡胎, ròu yǎn fán tāi — "eyes of flesh, a womb-born frame" — is the standard phrase for people who simply cannot see what is going on in front of them. The sting is that it covers the pilgrims too: Sanzang, Bajie and Wujing sat there through the whole errand and noticed nothing.