冷水攻心 Cold Water and the Failing Heart
這大聖一身煙火，炮燥難禁，徑投於澗水內救火。怎知被冷水一逼，弄得火氣攻心，三魂出舍。可憐氣塞胸堂喉舌冷，魂飛魄散喪殘生。慌得那四海龍王在半空裡收了雨澤，高聲大叫：「天蓬元帥、捲簾將軍，休在林中藏隱，且尋你師兄出來。」这大圣一身烟火，炮燥难禁，径投于涧水内救火。怎知被冷水一逼，弄得火气攻心，三魂出舍。可怜气塞胸堂喉舌冷，魂飞魄散丧残生。慌得那四海龙王在半空里收了雨泽，高声大叫：「天蓬元帅、卷帘将军，休在林中藏隐，且寻你师兄出来。」
逐句解 Line by line
This Great Sage, his whole body smoke and fire, could not bear the scorching heat, and plunged straight into the torrent to quench it.
Driven off, body still full of fire, and he does the obvious thing: dives into the torrent. 炮 is read pào here, the scorching sense, rather than the páo it took in the fire set-piece where it meant refining elixir. 禁 is jīn, to endure -- the heat was unendurable. Every instinct in the line is right and every one of them is about to be wrong.
Little did he know that, forced back by the cold water, the fire-vapour was driven inward to assail his heart, and his three souls departed their dwelling.
And here is why. The cold water hits the outside and drives the fire inward -- 火氣攻心, the fire-vapour assaults the heart. This is not metaphor; it is Chinese medical physiology, in which sudden cold on a heated body traps the heat where it can do damage. Then 三魂出舍, the three souls leave their dwelling. In Chinese thought a person has three cloud-souls and seven white-souls, and when the three depart, you are dying.
Pitiful! — his breath stopped in the breast, throat and tongue gone cold; soul fled and spirit scattered, his remnant life all but lost.
A couplet, and it reads exactly like verse, but the source gives it no marker so it stays as running prose. Breath blocked in the chest, throat and tongue gone cold, soul flown and spirit scattered. 塞 is read sè, the literary sound for obstruction, not the everyday sāi of stuffing something in. 可憐 -- pitiful -- is the narrator's own voice breaking through, which he does very rarely.
So alarmed were the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas that they withdrew their rain in mid-air and cried aloud: ‘Marshal Tianpeng! General Curtain-Roller! Hide no longer in the wood, but go and seek out your elder brother!’
The dragon kings shut off the rain and start shouting for help, and what they shout is interesting: they call Bajie and Sha Monk by their old celestial ranks. 天蓬元帥, Marshal Tianpeng, commanded eighty thousand troops of the Heavenly River before he was thrown down and born as a pig. 捲簾將軍, the Curtain-Rolling General, stood beside the Jade Emperor's throne before he broke a goblet and was exiled to a river. To a dragon king these are colleagues who have come down in the world, and in a crisis he uses the titles he knew them by.
Wukong nearly dies, and not from anything the demon did directly. Driven off by smoke, his body still burning, he plunges into cold water -- and that is what almost kills him. The cold seals the heat inside, it strikes at the heart, his breath stops and his three souls leave.
The physiology is real and specific. Chinese medicine holds that sudden cold on an overheated body traps the heat where it can do harm, and the same framework of vapour and organs and souls that the fire set-piece used to explain the Five Phases is now being used to explain a collapse. The chapter is consistent about this: it built its monster out of a cosmological diagram, and it takes its hero apart with the same one.
There is also a plain irony in it. Water was the answer. Water was the whole plan, the reason for the errand to the ocean and the four kings and the pulled-down Milky Way. Water does not put out this fire, and when Wukong finally gets into some, it nearly finishes him.