仗酒偷丹 Wine And The Stolen Elixir
逐句解 Line by line
"Venus memorialised the Dark Vault Emperor again, and a second decree of pardon and appointment came down.
降 is jiàng here, to send down from above — the reading that goes with decrees and rain, against the xiáng of subduing five lines back. 招安 is the standard term for buying off a rebel with an official post.
"They enfeoffed me as the true Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and only then was I called timber fit for roof-beams.
棟梁材 is ridgepole-and-beam timber, the standard figure for a person fit to hold up a state. 那 is nà, that — pointing at the moment, not asking about it.
"Then, because I threw the Peach Banquet into confusion and, emboldened by wine, stole the elixir, I brought disaster down on myself.
蟠桃會 is the Queen Mother's peach banquet, where the fruit of immortality is served once every few thousand years. 仗酒 is relying on drink — doing something you would not have dared sober.
"The Most High Lord Lao memorialised the throne in person; the Queen Mother of the Western Pool made obeisance at the Jasper Terrace.
太上老君 is Laozi in his divine office — the same patriarch whose furnace produced both Wukong's hardened body and, this chapter will later say, the golden bells. 瑤臺 is the jasper terrace of the Queen Mother's palace.
Four lines, and every one of them names somebody important. Venus, the Jade Emperor under his title 玄穹帝, the Most High Lord Lao, the Queen Mother of the West. The rhetorical work is being done by the guest list — the point is not what happened but who had to be involved.
招安 is the word to notice in the first line. It is the standard bureaucratic term for pacifying a rebel by giving him a post, and it is used with complete accuracy: Heaven's response to an armed uprising was a promotion. Wukong is telling this story to a monster who has stolen a queen, and the moral he is drawing is that trouble gets rewarded.
仗酒偷丹 — emboldened by wine, stole the elixir — arrives at a delicate moment. Wukong has spent the previous night getting a monster drunk in order to steal three bells, and here he is boasting about having once done exactly that to Heaven. Nobody in the poem points it out.