盡力一搧 Three Fannings Of The Fire
行者道：「師父且請下馬，兄弟們莫走。等我搧息了火，待風雨之後，地土冷些，再過山去。」行者果舉扇，徑至火邊，盡力一搧，那山上火光烘烘騰起；再一扇，更著百倍；又一扇，那火足有千丈之高，漸漸燒著身體。行者道：「师父且请下马，兄弟们莫走。等我扇息了火，待风雨之后，地土冷些，再过山去。」行者果举扇，径至火边，尽力一扇，那山上火光烘烘腾起；再一扇，更着百倍；又一扇，那火足有千丈之高，渐渐烧着身体。
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim said, 'Master, pray dismount; brothers, don't go on.'
且請下馬, "be so good as to get down." He is arranging the party at a safe distance, which is prudent and, as it turns out, nowhere near far enough.
'Let me fan the fire out; and when the wind and rain have come and the ground is a little cooler, then we will go over the mountain.'
The plan follows the cake-seller's formula exactly — one fanning puts the fire out, a second raises wind, a third brings rain — which Pilgrim heard in the road and has repeated twice since. He is about to discover what the formula is worth with the wrong fan.
Pilgrim did indeed raise the fan, went straight to the edge of the fire and fanned with all his strength — and the flames on that mountain came roaring and leaping up;
盡 is jìn in 盡力, "with all one's strength." 烘烘 is a word for the look and sound of a fire taking hold. The semicolon is the source's own, and the sentence has two more parts to run.
he fanned a second time, and it blazed a hundredfold;
著 is zháo, the reading for catching — 著火, to catch fire — the same one at work in 著急 and in 焦著 earlier in the chapter. 更 is gèng, "still more." Seven characters, the middle beat of three.
he fanned a third time, and that fire stood a full thousand zhàng high, and began little by little to burn against his body.
A zhàng is ten chǐ, roughly three metres, so the flame is standing something like three thousand metres high — comfortably taller than any mountain in the story. 燒著 is again the catching zháo. The three parts are one sentence in the source, cut at two semicolons and deliberately kept apart here: they climb rather than run parallel, and the climb is the passage.
Pilgrim's plan is the cake-seller's formula, word for word. One fanning puts the fire out; a second raises wind; a third brings rain; then the ground cools and they cross. He heard it from a young man with a red cart in the road, repeated it to the old man at the gate, and repeated it again to the Rākṣasī at her door. It has been the object of the entire chapter.
What happens is the exact inversion, and the source builds it as three beats separated by semicolons. With all his strength: the flames come roaring up. A second time: a hundredfold. A third time: a thousand zhàng high — something like three thousand metres — and beginning to burn against him.
The verb at the second and third beats is 著, in the reading that means catching: 著火, to take fire. It is the same one that governs 著急 and the 焦著 Pilgrim used of his master's worry early in the chapter — and its appearance here, with actual fire as the thing catching hold, is the literal case of which anxiety seizing a person is only the figure.
The three parts are one sentence in the source and they are kept as three here, because they climb rather than run parallel. Fusing them would flatten the only structure the passage has. Each fanning is worse than the last, and the fan the whole chapter was spent obtaining is making the obstacle bigger.