原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
下回分解 To the Next Chapter
畢竟不知豬八戒性命如何，且聽下回分解。毕竟不知猪八戒性命如何，且听下回分解。
逐句解 Line by line
畢竟不知豬八戒性命如何，且聽下回分解。
毕竟不知猪八戒性命如何，且听下回分解。
In the end, whether Zhu Eight Rules’s life was saved or no — listen to the telling in the next chapter.
性命如何 (xìngmìng rúhé), "whether his life [would be saved]." 且聽下回分解, "listen to the telling in the next chapter" — the novel’s standard chapter-closing formula.
The chapter ends on the storyteller’s standard hook — whether Eight Rules will keep his life is left to the next installment — a formula that closes every chapter of the novel and here suspends the Gold- and Silver-Horn arc at the moment of its first capture.
The unresolved cliff-hanger is structural: the pig’s seizure is only the opening move of a long episode in which the five treasures, planted in the woodcutter’s warning, will drive the demons’ contest with Pilgrim across the chapters to come. The Wood-Mother’s disaster is the hook on which the whole arc is hung.