二猴相敵 Two Staves Two Apes
二行者在一處，果是不分真假，好打呀：二行者在一处，果是不分真假，好打呀：
逐句解 Line by line
The two Pilgrims closed in one place, and truly there was no telling true from false. A fine fight it was:
The tag 好打呀 — what a fight! — is the storyteller winding up his audience before the set-piece, and the printed page runs it straight into the verse that follows.
Two rods of iron, two ape-sprites, / this bout of matched foes was no light thing.
相敵 takes xiāng, evenly matched against each other, the sense of two things doing something to one another — not the xiàng of 相貌, a face.
Both would guard and uphold the Tang Imperial Brother, / each plied his merits to set up a hero's name.
The Tang Imperial Brother, 唐御弟, is Tripitaka, sworn younger brother to the Tang emperor. 都 is dōu, both of them — and both of them claim to be guarding him.
The true ape in truth received the teaching of the Śramaṇa gate; / the false monster falsely laid claim to the Buddha-son's feeling.
The one line in the whole poem that takes a side. 佛子 reads zǐ, a son of the Buddha: the dignified word keeps its full tone, as 弟子 and 童子 do elsewhere in the project, rather than the flat zi of 猴子, a monkey.
Because their spirit-powers were many in transformation, / with no true and no false the two stood level.
And here the poem gives the side back again. 無真無假兩相平 states the chapter's problem as a piece of arithmetic rather than a mystery: no true, no false, the two exactly level. 為 is wèi, because.
The one was the Primal-Unity Breath, Sage Equal to Heaven; / the one was a long-refined thousand-spirit earth-shrinking sprite.
Two grand titles, and the verse refuses to say which belongs to whom: 一個…一個, the one … the one. Not "the other". Even the grammar declines to make a distinction.
This one had the As-You-Will gold-hooped rod; / that one had a follow-the-heart iron-shafted arm.
The impostor's weapon takes its name from a synonym of Wukong's. 如意金箍棒 is the As-You-Will Gold-Hooped Rod; 隨心鐵桿兵 answers it with 隨心, follow-the-heart, which means the same thing in different words. Even the props rhyme.
Parrying and blocking, there was no victory or defeat; / propping and withstanding, there was no losing or winning.
The line puts 無 and 沒 on either side of the break — the bookish negative and the everyday one, both saying nothing doing. 沒 is méi, there is not.
At first they crossed hands outside the cave; / in a little while the contest rose into mid-air.
少頃, shǎo, in a little while. This last pair of lines ends the set-piece by lifting the fight into the air, and the prose that follows picks it up there.
The set-piece is built almost entirely out of pairs — 兩條, 二猴, 都要, 各施, 一個…一個, 這個…那個 — and every pair is perfectly balanced. Verse of this kind normally uses its symmetry to set two things against each other. Here the symmetry has nothing to separate, and the form itself becomes the argument.
The third couplet is the only one that claims a difference: 真猴實受沙門教，假怪虛稱佛子情. The narrator knows which is which and says so, setting 實, really, against 虛, emptily, and 受, received, against 稱, claimed. One of them took the vows; the other only says he feels the part. This is knowledge available to the poem and to the reader and to nobody inside the story. Two lines later the verse gives it up again — 無真無假兩相平 — and that surrender governs everything that follows.
The difference the couplet does draw is worth keeping hold of, because it is not a difference of power or of looks. It is the difference between having gone through something and saying you have. 受 is passive and historical; 稱 is active and present-tense. No fight can test that, which is exactly why this fight cannot end.