The fiend would hear no more of it. The three of them changed countenance, and here was a fine slaughter beneath the water:

不容分說, allowing not a word of explanation. 三家, the three parties. Then 好殺 and a colon open the battle-poem, which runs to a hundred and ninety-one characters — the longest single stretch of verse in the chapter, and half as long again as the next.

Copper mallet, precious staff, and iron-toothed rake; / Wuneng and Wujing at war with the fiend.

The poem opens on the religious names, 悟能 and 悟淨, where the prose all round it uses the nicknames. That switch is deliberate and it is a warning: what follows is not going to be a brawl but a diagram.

The one, Heavenly Reeds come down into the world; / the other, a Senior General descended to the sky's edge.

天蓬 is Bajie's old office in Heaven, Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds. 上將 is Sha Monk, once Curtain-Raising Captain — 將 here read jiàng, a military rank. And 降天涯 takes 降 as jiàng, "to come down," which is the other half of the pair set up in the staff's poem a moment ago, where the same character was xiáng, "to subdue."

Those two press the water-monster from either side in a show of arms; / this one alone withstands the holy monks, and his force is worth the praise.

The lines stretch to ten characters each just as the fighting thickens — the metre loosening with the action. 夾攻 is the attack from both sides at once.

Having the portion and having the affinity, they will attain the Great Way; / begetting and overcoming by turns, they hold to sands past number.

有分: 分 is fèn, a portion allotted to you, not fēn, "to divide." 相生相剋 is the Five Phases doctrine that each element both feeds and defeats another, in two closed cycles — the system behind Chinese medicine, fortune-telling and dynastic theory alike, and here behind a fight. 相 xiāng. 恆沙, the sands of the Ganges, is the Buddhist figure for a number too large to hold.

Earth overcomes water, and the water dries to show its bed;

乾 is gān, "dry" — the same character also names the first trigram of the 易經, where it is qián, and that is the reading a reader is likelier to have met. Here it is simply dry. The drop to three-character lines marks the turn from telling a story to reciting a system.

water begets wood, and the wood grows rank and flowers.

生, begetting, and 剋, overcoming, are the two relations that link the Five Phases, and the poem sets one line of each side by side so the pattern is visible on the page.

Chan practice, investigated and cultivated, returns to a single body; / the Reverted Elixir, roasted and refined, subdues the three houses.

參 cān, to look deeply into a teaching. 還丹 (huán dān), the Reverted Elixir, is a term from inner alchemy — the Daoist discipline that treats the body itself as the crucible, so the furnace, the cinnabar and the refining are all happening inside the practitioner. 還 is the verb huán, "to return," not the adverb hái. 炮 is páo, "to roast in the crucible," not pào, a cannon.

Earth is the mother, and puts out the golden sprout; metal begets the divine water, which brings forth the infant;

金芽, the golden sprout, and 嬰娃, the infant — a variant of the usual 嬰兒 — are technical names for stages in the forming of the inner elixir. They belong to the Quanzhen school of Daoism, and the novel's verse reaches for this vocabulary again and again.

water is the root, and moistens the flowering wood; wood holds a blaze of fierce and fiery light.

水為本: 為 is wéi, the linking "is" — as against the wèi, "for the sake of," that the same character takes in 為釋迦 four couplets further down. 木華: 華 is read huā, the classical equivalent of 花, a flower. It has to be the noun, because it is standing in strict parallel with the golden sprout of the line before — golden sprout against wood's bloom — and both fit the rhyme equally well, so the sentence pattern is what decides it.

The Five Phases gathered close are each of them distinct; / and so their faces alter, each at variance with the rest.

攢簇 (cuán cù), gathering into a tight cluster, is another inner-alchemy term: drawing the Five Phases together into one point. 攢 is cuán, not the commoner zǎn. 爭差 is a Yuan and Ming spoken compound for a discrepancy or a mishap, and takes 差 as the noun chā rather than the verb chà.

Look at that copper mallet — nine petals, bright and fine; / the precious staff with its thousand threads of coloured broidery.

看他那, "look at that" — the storyteller's gesture, but here it comes in the middle of a poem already running, not at the head of a new one, so the verse simply carries on. 那 points, nà.

The rake, ordered by yin and yang, is parcelled among the Nine Luminaries; / not knowing the moves, all is as tangled as hemp.

九曜, the Nine Luminaries of the Chinese calendar — sun, moon, the five visible planets and two invisible ones. 解數 is read xiè shù, a set of martial moves, and not the commoner jiě; the older reading survives in the living idiom 渾身解數, "every move in the book." 數 shù, the noun.

They give up the body and cast away life because of the monk's peril; / they abandon death and forget living for the sake of Śākya.

僧難: 難 is nàn, the noun "calamity." 為釋迦: 為 is wèi, "for the sake of" — the promised opposite of the wéi four couplets above.

So the copper mallet is kept busy and never falls slack, / warding off the staff on the left and the rake on the right.

忙不墜, busy and never letting up. The poem ends where a scorecard would: one demon holding off two weapons at once, and nobody an inch ahead.