The old fiend and the Great Sage had fought some twenty bouts, with neither the advantage.

不分勝負 — "no telling win from loss," 分 read fēn, to distinguish. Twenty bouts and the single combat is deadlocked, which is why the fiend now changes the terms.

He gave a point of his sword-tip and cried: "Little ones, all together!"

劍梢一指 — "pointed with the sword-tip." Unable to win alone, he calls up his host.

The three hundred and more sprites swarmed up in a body and ringed Pilgrim in their midst.

垓心 (gāi xīn) is the dead centre of an encirclement. Three hundred imps close on Wukong from every side.

That fine Great Sage, wholly without fear, plied a single staff — thrusting left, striking right, guarding rear and front.

公然無懼 is "openly, utterly unafraid." The run of paired verbs — 左衝右撞，後抵前遮 — is doing the work of a blur, four directions in eight characters.

Those little fiends all had their skill: the more he beat them the more they pressed on, clinging like cotton-wadding to his body, clutching his waist and dragging at his legs, not one willing to fall back.

And the fine detail that makes the scene: 一似綿絮纏身, "clinging like cotton-floss to his body." The imps do not fight him so much as smother him. 摟腰扯腿 is "clutching his waist, dragging at his legs."

The Great Sage grew flustered, and at once worked his Body-Beyond-the-Body art: he plucked a fistful of hairs from under his left flank, chewed them small and spat them out, and cried: "Change!"

身外身法 (shēn wài shēn fǎ) is the "body-outside-the-body" method, Wukong's signature trick of turning plucked hairs into working copies of himself. 嚼碎噴去 is "chewed them fine and spat them out"; 喝 (hè) is to shout.

Every single hair turned into a Pilgrim.

一根根都變做行者 — "each and every one became a Pilgrim."

See them: the tall ones wielding staves, the short ones swinging fists, and the smallest, with no room to strike, seizing the imps by the ankle-bone and gnawing their sinews — they beat those little fiends into a scatter of falling stars and drifting cloud, till the imps cried out as one: "Great King! The thing has gone all awry — hard, hard indeed!"

The humour turns visual and cumulative. 長的使棒 — the tall ones use staves, with 長 read cháng, "long, tall," against 短, short, rather than zhǎng, senior. 沒處下手 is "no place to get a hold," 處 read chù — so the smallest clones, unable to reach anything better, go for 抱著孤拐啃觔, clutching the ankle-bone and gnawing the sinew, with 著 marking the grip as held (zhe). The previous chapter settles what 孤拐 means: trapped in the gourd, Wukong pretends to dissolve and calls out that his 孤拐 have melted, then that the waist-joint has gone, at which the demon judges him finished — so the part melts from the bottom up and lies below the waist. The imps' wail 難矣乎哉 (nán yǐ hū zāi), "how hard indeed!", is mock-classical — they are panicking in the register of a Confucian text.

Covering the ground and filling the hills, they were all Sun Xingzhe.

滿地盈山 — "carpeting the earth, brimming the mountain." The image is a whole landscape of identical Monkeys, and it is the picture the chapter is remembered for.

The Body-Beyond method drove the pack of fiends back, leaving only the old fiend hemmed in the midst, chased east and west with no road out.

止撇得 is "left only," 得 the complement de. 圍困中間 is "hemmed in the midst" — the trick has not merely routed the host, it has stripped the master of it bare.