妖精化女 The Demon Takes a Maiden's Form
好妖精，停下陰風，在那山凹裡搖身一變，變做個月貌花容的女兒，說不盡那眉清目秀，齒白唇紅。左手提著一個青砂罐兒，右手提著一個綠磁瓶兒，從西向東，徑奔唐僧：好妖精，停下阴风，在那山凹里摇身一变，变做个月貌花容的女儿，说不尽那眉清目秀，齿白唇红。左手提著一个青砂罐儿，右手提著一个绿磁瓶儿，从西向东，径奔唐僧：
逐句解 Line by line
Excellent fiend! Halting its dark wind, it gave its body a shake there in a fold of the mountain and turned into a maiden of moon-like face and flower-like features — brows clear and eyes lovely beyond all telling, teeth white and lips red.
好妖精 "excellent fiend!" is the storyteller's admiring cry (as with 好猴王 earlier), relishing the demon's artistry rather than praising her morally. 搖身一變 (yáo shēn yí biàn) "with one shake of the body [it] transformed" is the stock formula for shape-shifting. 月貌花容 (yuè mào huā róng) and the paired 眉清目秀 / 齒白唇紅 are conventional beauty-formulae. Both 那 are demonstrative (那山凹, 那眉清目秀), read nà; 女兒 (nǚ ér) "maiden" takes 兒 (ér), the noun-sense; and 說不盡 forces 不 (bú) by sandhi (盡 (jìn) being raised to the fourth tone).
In her left hand she carried a grey-sand jar, in her right a green porcelain bottle; and from west to east she came, making straight for the Tang Monk:
The disguise is furnished with homely props — a food-jar and a bottle — to prop up the alms-giving pretext to come. 提著 (twice) "carrying," the aspect-marker 著 (zhe); the object-diminutives 罐兒 (guàn er) and 瓶兒 (píng er) take 兒 (er) (the retroflex suffix, distinct from the 兒 (ér) of 女兒 just above). The colon marks the descriptive verse that follows.
The holy monk had rested his horse upon the crag when of a sudden he saw a skirted, hairpinned woman drawing near.
聖僧 "the holy monk" is Tripitaka. 裙釵 (qún chāi) "skirt and hairpin" is metonymy for a woman. The regulated verse (律詩 (lǜ shī)) that describes the disguised fiend is cast, with cruel irony, in the very idiom the novel lavishes elsewhere on genuine beauties.
Kingfisher sleeves swayed light, sheathing jade bamboo-shoots; the Xiang-silk skirt, drawn aslant, showed golden lotuses.
玉筍 (yù sǔn) "jade bamboo-shoots" is a stock figure for slender, tapering fingers; 金蓮 (jīn lián) "golden lotus" for tiny bound feet, the era's ideal. 湘裙 (xiāng qún) "Xiang skirt" evokes the fine silks of the Xiang-river region.
Sweat on her powdered face — a flower holding dew; dust brushing her moth-brows — willows wreathed in mist.
Two parallel similes of dishevelled loveliness: perspiration likened to dew on a blossom, dust on the brows to mist among willows. 蛾眉 (é méi) "moth-brows," the finely arched eyebrows of a beauty.
Look closely, fix the eye upon her — and see, step by step she came right up to his side.
The closing couplet turns from portrait to motion, drawing the figure nearer. 仔細 (zǐ xì) "carefully" takes 仔 (zǐ); 觀看 (guān kàn) "to gaze," 觀 (guān); 行至 (xíng zhì) "walking up," 行 (xíng). The insistent 看看 sharpens the suspense of the approach.
The narrator's mock-admiring 好妖精 ("excellent fiend!") frames the demon's transformation with open relish. The disguise is meticulous: not merely a lovely face but the domestic props — the food-jar, the bottle — that will make the alms-giving story ring true. This is a demon who prevails by stagecraft, not by force, and the care she takes marks the whole chapter as a contest of perception rather than power.
The regulated verse is a study in weaponized convention. It renders the false maiden in exactly the apparatus of beauty — 玉筍 for the fingers, 金蓮 for the feet, 蛾眉 for the brows — that the novel reserves for genuine loveliness. The reader, unlike Tripitaka, knows the portrait is a fabrication, so the borrowed idiom becomes a snare: to admire is already to be deceived.
Formally this is a verse-tagged passage in the house manner: the prose block closing on the lead-in 徑奔唐僧： is fused with the 律詩 it introduces into one 含詞賦 passage, the prose furnished as ordinary segments and each verse couplet set as its own line.