死生不顧 The Battle-Verse (II)
逐句解 Line by line
You come, I go, blades crossed in the fray; / sword meeting, staff parrying, neither yielding a jot.
交鋒, jiāo fēng, to cross blade-points, to join battle; 不相饒, bù xiāng ráo, neither giving the other an inch.
The Monkey King's iron cudgel follows the Three Strategies; / the fiend's steel blade keeps to the Six Bow-Cases.
Both fighters are said to be reading from the classics — of warfare. 三略, Sān Lüè, the Three Strategies, and 六韜, Liù Tāo, the Six Bow-Cases, are two of the oldest Chinese military treatises. Attributing them to a monkey and a demon on a mountain peak is a joke and a compliment at once: these two are not brawling, they are fencing by the book.
The one, long practised in his arts, plays the fiend-lord; / the other, broadly working his powers, guards the Tang Monk.
慣行手段, guàn xíng shǒu duàn, long practised in his methods; 為魔主, wéi mó zhǔ, to be lord of fiends; 廣施法力, guǎng shī fǎ lì, to work his powers to the full. Here the parallel stops being decorative: it names which side each is on.
The fierce Monkey King grows fiercer yet; / the valiant fiend waxes the more in valour.
The line escalates by repeating itself — the fierce grow fiercer, the valiant more valiant. 猛烈, měng liè, fierce; 長英豪, zhǎng yīng háo, to grow the more heroic, with 長 read zhǎng, "to increase."
Heedless of life and death they fight aloft in the air — / all for the Tang Monk's sake, who bows to the Buddha afar.
And the last line pulls back to say what it is all for. 死生不顧, sǐ shēng bù gù, reckless of life and death; 都為唐僧, dōu wèi Táng sēng, all for the Tang Monk's sake — 為 here wèi, "for," not the wéi, "to be," of the line before.
The second half of the rhapsody keeps the parallel structure but turns it toward the fighters' inner qualities and allegiances. The discipline of each is figured through the ancient military classics, and the antithesis of fiend-lord against guardian of the pilgrim states the moral opposition beneath the clash of arms. The escalation — fierce growing fiercer, valiant more valiant — drives the couplets toward their close.
The final couplet lifts the whole from spectacle to purpose. Reckless of life and death as the combatants are, the verse declares the real stake to be the Tang Monk and the scripture-quest he carries, bowing to the Buddha far off. The turn is characteristic of the novel's battle-verses, which regularly close by referring the martial display back to the pilgrimage, so that even this duel on a demon's peak is folded into the larger design of the journey west.