呼龍降雨 Calling Down the Rain
那妖王與行者戰經二十回合，見得不能取勝，虛幌一槍，急抽身，捏著拳頭，又將鼻子搥了兩下，卻就噴出火來，那門前車子上煙火迸起，口眼中赤焰飛騰。孫大聖回頭叫道：「龍王何在？」那龍王兄弟帥眾水族，望妖精火光裡噴下雨來。那妖王与行者战经二十回合，见得不能取胜，虚幌一枪，急抽身，捏着拳头，又将鼻子搥了两下，却就喷出火来，那门前车子上烟火迸起，口眼中赤焰飞腾。孙大圣回头叫道：「龙王何在？」那龙王兄弟帅众水族，望妖精火光里喷下雨来。
逐句解 Line by line
The demon king, having fought the Pilgrim a full twenty bouts and seeing he could not prevail, made a feint with his spear, swiftly drew back, clenched his fist, and again struck his nose two blows; then out spurted the fire, the smoke-flame burst from the carts before the gate, and red flames went leaping from his mouth and eyes.
One long sentence for the whole sequence, and it moves fast: a feint with the spear, a step back, the fist clenched, two blows to the nose, and then fire out of the mouth, flame off the carts, red flames from mouth and eyes together. The reader has seen this ritual before and knows every step of it. 虛幌一槍 -- a false flourish of the spear -- is the tell that he is disengaging to reach for the fire, and Wukong has been waiting for exactly this.
The Great Sage Sun turned his head and called: ‘Where are the Dragon Kings?’
The cue, and it is a question rather than an order: where are the Dragon Kings? Four words. Everything Wukong has done for the last ten passages has been arranging for this line to be said at this moment.
The Dragon King and his brothers, leading the whole water-host, spouted rain down into the demon's blaze.
And the sky opens. 帥 is shuài, to lead. Four kings and the entire water-host of the world, aimed straight down into the blaze. It is a genuinely thrilling image and it is about to fail completely.
The trap springs exactly as designed. The demon goes through his ritual, Wukong calls his four words, and every ocean on earth comes down at once on a burning cave. As a piece of plotting it is clean: the plan was made, the cue was set, the cue was given, the response came instantly.
The premise underneath it is the one Sha Monk supplied -- water conquers fire, the second ring of the Five Phases. The premise is sound. What nobody has checked is whether this is fire in the sense the doctrine means. The set-piece two passages back said plainly that it was not: not the fire drilled from wood, not the fire under Laozi's crucible, not lightning, not a wildfire. Everyone read that description as a boast about how powerful the fire was. It was also a warning about what kind of thing it is.