五百餘年 Five Hundred Years And More
逐句解 Line by line
"The Buddha, knowing beforehand, used a trick to fool me, and I was pinned down by him at the sky's edge.
賺哄 pairs two words for deceiving, and 哄 is hǒng — the same character the queen used on the fiend the night before. Even in defeat Wukong describes it as a trick rather than a defeat.
"To this day five hundred years and more have passed; my humble frame is freed and I am up to my tricks again.
解 is jiě, to loosen or release. 弄乖 is to play clever, to get up to something — a wry, self-deprecating phrase for a career of causing trouble.
"I am escorting the Tang monk to the Western Regions on purpose; Wukong Pilgrim is perfectly clear about it.
He finally gives the name the fiend asked for, in the last two lines of a poem four hundred and forty-eight characters long. 甚 is shèn, the intensifier — perfectly, entirely clear.
"On the westward road I subdue fiends and monsters — what evil spirit does not fear me!"
降 is xiáng, to subdue, the reading that stands in this chapter's title. 不 drops to bú before the falling tone of 懼.
The imprisonment gets one line and it is phrased as a complaint about sportsmanship. 賺哄法 — a trick, a deception — is how Wukong describes being beaten by the Buddha, and 哄 is the very character the queen used on this fiend the night before. Everyone in this chapter is fooling somebody.
五百餘年 lands the whole poem back in the present. Five hundred years and more under a mountain, and then 又弄乖 — and I am up to my tricks again — as though the imprisonment had been a pause between jobs.
And then the answer. The fiend asked for a surname and a name; four hundred and forty-eight characters later he gets 悟空行者, in the second-to-last line, after everything else. The poem is arranged so that the name is not information but a conclusion — you have heard what I did, so you already know who I am.