南天門外柱 It Scorches The Pillars Of Heaven
逐句解 Line by line
It reaches up to smoke the pillars outside the Southern Gate of Heaven; it reaches to scorch the beams above the Hall of the Numinous Empyrean.
著 is zháo twice here — contact that actually arrives, rather than the zhe of an action merely continuing. The point of the couplet is that the smoke gets all the way up to Heaven's own architecture, so the verb has to land. The other reading would say only that it went on smoking.
It burns the running beasts in their dens till hide and all is rotted away; the flying birds in the wood are left with their feathers stripped bare.
得 is the light de, tying 燒 to what the burning produced. 連皮爛 is rotted up to and including the hide — the skin being the outermost part and so the last thing you would expect to go.
Only look how vicious this smoke is — how is anyone to go into the deep mountain and put down the monster king?
The piece closes on a question, which is unusual: these set-pieces normally end on a statement. 伏 is to subdue and hold down, a heavier word than simply to defeat, and it is precisely what Wukong came here to do.
The smoke gets measured twice, in opposite directions. Upward it reaches the pillars and roof-beams of Heaven, which are the furthest things this book has; downward it reaches into dens and treetops and takes the skin off whatever it finds. Between those two lines the entire vertical extent of the world has been covered.
The closing line is the first admission of difficulty in the chapter. Wukong has beaten a vanguard in seven lines of verse, turned down a horse, turned down provisions, and crossed three thousand li on the strength of a boast about a cooling cup. He now looks at a column of smoke and asks how anybody is supposed to get through it.