攢簇五行 The Five Phases Clustered
逐句解 Line by line
"Heaven leaned upon for a lid and earth taken for a furnace; two medicines rolled the crow and the hare into one.
為 falls twice and is wéi both times — the serving-as reading, heaven acting as lid and earth as furnace, not the wèi that means on behalf of. The line turns the whole cosmos into laboratory equipment. 烏兔 are the crow that lives in the sun and the hare that lives in the moon, so the two medicines going into that furnace are the sun and moon themselves.
"I gathered yin and yang and crossed the water with the fire, and in one moment came suddenly to see through the mysterious pass.
玄關, the mysterious pass, is the barrier in inner alchemy at which the practice either opens or does not — the one gate everything else is preparation for. 頓 is all-at-once, and it carries the line: everything before this had been gradual, and then it was not.
"All by the working of the Heavenly Ladle to convey it, and by the Dipper's handle to shift my footing.
斗 is dǒu, the ladle and the constellation, not the dòu of fighting. 天罡 and 斗柄 both belong to the Great Bear, and the line asks two different things of it — the first for the force that moves the work along, the second for the bearing to steer by. A navigator's star doing double duty as an engine.
"Drawing the furnace back and driving the fire forward keeps strictly to the hour; drawing off lead and adding quicksilver, the two have regard to each other.
鉛 and 汞, lead and quicksilver, are the standing pair of inner alchemy and stand for the two opposed forces rather than for actual metals. 相 is xiāng, mutually — they attend to each other. And 退爐進火 is about timing, which the line insists matters more than anything else in the operation.
"Cluster the five phases and creation is born; blend the four images and the seasons are measured out.
攢 is cuán, to gather things into a tight cluster, and it is not the reading a dictionary offers first. 和 is hé, the level tone that means bringing into agreement — as in 調和 — rather than the falling huò of physically stirring something together. 行 in 五行 is xíng.
"The two vapours come home within the yellow path; the three families meet on the road of the golden elixir.
黃道 is the yellow path, the sun's apparent track through the sky, borrowed by the alchemists as the name of the body's central channel. 三家 are the three families of the inner work. The line closes the sequence by bringing everything that has been kept apart into one place — which is what the whole operation was for.
Six lines, and almost every content word belongs to inner alchemy: furnace and fire, lead and quicksilver, the five phases, the four images, the two vapours, the three families, the yellow path, the golden elixir. The king asked how a monkey travels fast and is being handed a technical syllabus.
The sequence is an operation and it runs in order — vessel, then raw materials, then the instrument of movement, then the timing, then the combination, and last the convergence. Read as instructions it is complete enough to look followable and vague enough to be useless, which is exactly what this literature is like: recipes written for people who already have a teacher.
None of it answers the question as asked. One line of the six does turn on movement — the third, where the Ladle conveys and the Dipper's handle shifts the footing — but the moving happens inside the body, not across ground. Wukong is establishing that his powers were earned by a named and orthodox method before he will say what they are, and the pedigree matters more to him than the answer.