化作老翁 She Becomes an Old Man
好妖精，按聳陰風，在山坡下搖身一變，變做一個老公公，真個是：好妖精，按耸阴风，在山坡下摇身一变，变做一个老公公，真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
Excellent fiend! Settling its shadowy wind, it gave its body a shake below the mountain slope and turned into an old man — and truly he was:
The family is complete: a daughter, a mother, and now a father out looking for the pair of them. It is the oldest principle in confidence work — build a story that accounts for its own loose ends — and she has been assembling this one for three passages. 老公公 is an ordinary, warm word for an old man, near enough "grandad". The colon means a portrait is coming.
White hair like Pengzu's; a hoary beard to rival the Star of Longevity.
Two names for extreme old age, both instantly legible to any Chinese reader. 彭祖 (Péng zǔ) is the Chinese Methuselah, said to have managed eight hundred years. The 壽星 (Shòu xīng), the Star of Longevity, is the god of long life — the small smiling figure with the enormous domed forehead and the white beard, still sold in every souvenir shop in China. The poem opens on emblems of age exactly as the maiden's opened on emblems of beauty.
In his ears a ringing as of jade chimes; before his eyes a flickering of golden stars.
These two lines describe symptoms. A ringing in the ears, likened to the note of a jade chime-stone; gold stars swimming across the vision. Anybody who has stood up too quickly knows the second one. The poem has moved from how he looks to what it feels like to be him, which is a considerable feat of impersonation for something made of bones. (耳中 takes 中 as zhōng.)
In his hand a dragon-headed staff; on his body a crane-down cloak, light as air.
The props promote him from old to holy. A 龍頭拐 is a walking stick with a dragon's head carved on the handle; a 鶴氅 (hè chǎng) is a cloak of crane down, which in Chinese painting is what a mountain recluse or a minor immortal wears. She is not dressing as a peasant. She is dressing as somebody a monk would want to bow to.
A string of prayer-beads told between his fingers, his mouth reciting the Namo sutra.
And the finishing touch, which is the cleverest thing she does in the chapter: she gives him a rosary and puts a prayer in his mouth. 南無 is read ná mó here, the liturgical spelling of the Sanskrit namas, "homage" — the opening word of countless Buddhist invocations, and still what you hear chanted in any Chinese temple. 數珠 takes 數 as shù, "to count"; 掐 (qiā) is to pinch the beads along one at a time. She has dressed herself as everything Tripitaka most respects and set the trap squarely in his blind spot.
The third disguise completes the fabricated family: the slain daughter, the searching mother, and now the aged father come after them both. The portrait-verse mirrors the maiden's beauty-poem in reverse — where she was jade and blossom, he is white hair, ringing ears and a dragon-headed stick — and the two together frame the demon's range across youth and age, woman and man.
The masterstroke is the piety. The old man tells his beads and chants the 南無 devotions: an aged, holy figure of precisely the kind Tripitaka most reveres. The first disguise baited the party's weakness for beauty and the second their guilt; this one reflects the monk's own devotion back at him. It is the cleverest of the three masks.
On the build: the one-line prose tag is joined to the poem it introduces, each couplet set as its own line, in the same manner as the earlier verse passages. It is the last of the three disguises to be given a portrait-poem — though one more set-piece verse remains in the chapter, at Wukong's departure.