八戒攪局 Bajie Breaks the Spell
八戒上前扯住長老道：「師父，莫聽亂講，誤了睡覺。這月啊：八戒上前扯住长老道：「师父，莫听乱讲，误了睡觉。这月啊：
逐句解 Line by line
Bajie came forward and tugged at the elder, saying: “Master, don't listen to their wild talk and lose your sleep over it.”
扯住 "to pull at, grab hold of"; 莫聽亂講 "don't heed the loose talk"; 誤了睡覺 "to spoil one's sleep," 覺 read jiào; 長 read zhǎng.
As for this moon:
Bajie introduces his own, very different moon-verse.
Waned but a little while, it rounds out again — like me, born never quite complete.
不十全 "not ten-tenths whole, imperfect," 似 read sì. Bajie reads the moon, characteristically, as a figure for himself.
At meals they grudge me my big belly; when I take up a bowl they say I slobber.
肚子大 "a big belly"; 黏涎 "sticky drool, slaver." Bajie's litany of grievances.
They're all clever and have cultivated their blessings; I'm just a dolt who's piled up a bit of karmic merit.
他都 "they all," 都 read dōu; 伶俐 "clever, sharp"; 痴愚 "foolish, dull"; 積下緣 "accumulated affinity/merit."
I say your scripture-fetching just pays off the karma of the three evil paths — then you'll wag your tail and shake your head and go straight up to heaven.
還滿三塗業 "to repay in full the karma of the three (evil) paths," 還 read huán; 三塗 the three evil destinies (hell, hungry ghosts, beasts); 擺尾搖頭 "to wag the tail and shake the head," a comic-animal image. Bajie deflates the lofty discourse with earthy grumbling.
Bajie shatters the contemplative mood exactly as one would expect. Impatient with the doctrine and wanting his sleep, he grabs his master and offers his own moon-poem — a comic inversion of Tripitaka's lyric and the disciples' alchemy. Where they saw cosmic principle, Bajie sees himself: the moon, waning and waxing, is "like me, born never quite complete," and the verse tips at once into his stock grievances about being mocked for his appetite and his slobbering.
The deflation is structurally the point. After three ascending turns of high doctrine — Wukong's alchemy, Sha Monk's Five-Agent completion, the enlightenment couplet — Bajie's earthy grumbling returns the scene to the human (and porcine) ground, and returns the pilgrims to bed. His parting jibe, that the whole scripture-quest is just a way to "pay off the karma of the three evil paths" and then swan up to heaven wagging his tail, is characteristically both crude and not entirely wrong — a comic reminder, beneath the alchemical symbolism, of the plain penitential logic of the journey.