And this was a fine fight:

The cue is folded into its own unit rather than standing alone, so this line opens the poem instead of announcing it. 場 reads cháng, the level tone this measure word takes — the Kāngxī dictionary records no rising-tone reading for the character at all.

Two cudgels, and not alike; set it out and each has its own shape — one short and pliant, a weapon of the Buddha's house; one hard, the treasure stored in the sea.

The poem opens by comparing the weapons rather than the men, and it will keep that up for four couplets. 藏 stands twice inside three characters and takes both of its readings: cáng, to store away, then zàng, the store itself. The second is the rhyme word and has to be zàng, since every other line here rhymes in the departing tone. The line says where the cudgel came from without naming the place — a store under the sea.

Each has the power to change at its owner's will, and this time they have met to see which is the stronger.

隨心變化 is precisely what the cymbals did, and the poem hands the property to both weapons rather than to either fighter. 相 is xiāng, the reciprocal: they meet each other.

The short pliant wolf-tooth, gaudy in mixed brocade; the hard gold-banded one, in the likeness of a river dragon.

The couplet picks up 短軟 and 堅硬 from two couplets back and hangs a decoration on each, patchwork against a dragon. That is the third time within three hundred and eighty characters that the demon's weapon has been called short and pliant, and the novel is not letting the reader forget it.

Thick or slender as you please, it is a thing to boast of; short as you want or long as you want, and always just right.

當 reads dàng in 停當, apt or just so, because the rhyme wants the departing tone. The same character takes dāng four couplets on, in the middle of a line where nothing constrains it — one character, two readings, one poem. 長 is cháng, the adjective.

Ape and demon, joined in battle, and this bout was no idle boast.

This is the one rhyme word in the poem that no longer answers, and it is worth knowing why. The other ten are all departing tone, and so was this character once: the Kāngxī dictionary gives it one spelling and no other, 居況切 and 古況切, both departing, and it was still a departing-tone word in the Yuan rhyme tables that record the language this novel was written in. The modern second tone is a later pull from its sound-half, 狂. The reading edition gives the modern reading, because that is what a reader can look up — the rhyme is a casualty of four hundred years.

The tamed ape, holding to the teaching, plays the mind-monkey; the rascal monster, cheating Heaven, works a false likeness.

The one couplet that separates the two fighters, and it does so by their titles. 心猿 is Pilgrim under his alchemical name, the mind-monkey, and 假像 is the whole of the demon's method in two characters: a false likeness. A trained ape against a pretending monster.

Angry and angry, spiteful and spiteful, neither with any feeling; wicked and wicked, savage and savage, and both of them with a style of it.

Four doubled pairs across fourteen characters, two to a line, which is as dense as this chapter's verse gets — the sound of two people going at each other. 各 and 都 sit in matching positions and insist that the two of them are alike in it.

That one, striking straight down with the hand raised, would not slacken; this one, throwing up a guard full in the face, would not give ground.

The longest lines in the poem, ten characters each, and 那一個 / 這一個 refuses to say which fighter is which. 當 is dāng here, head-on, against the dàng of 停當 four couplets back.

Blown cloud dulled the sun; spat mist hid the peaks.

Five characters to the line, the only couplet in the poem on that measure, dropped in just before the close. It moves the camera off the fighters completely for one couplet — nothing in it is a weapon or a body, only weather.

Cudgel came and cudgel went, the two of them meeting; and both forgot life and forgot death — because of Tripitaka.

The last three characters are the only mention in the whole poem of why any of this is happening. 藏 is zàng, the elder's own name, closing the poem on the same rhyme its first couplet used for the store under the sea — once a treasury, once a man.