得了性命 They Got Their Lives Back
行者把藥扳開他們牙關，每人揌了一丸。須臾，藥味入腹，便就一齊嘔噦，遂吐出毒味，得了性命。那八戒先爬起道：「悶殺我也。」三藏、沙僧俱醒了道：「好暈也。」行者把药扳开他们牙关，每人揌了一丸。须臾，药味入腹，便就一齐呕哕，遂吐出毒味，得了性命。那八戒先爬起道：「闷杀我也。」三藏、沙僧俱醒了道：「好晕也。」
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim prised their jaws apart and stuffed a pill into each of them.
扳開牙關 is to force open the jaw-hinge — the phrase used of somebody unconscious. 揌 is the same verb the Daoist used for packing poison into a date. Same action, opposite direction.
In a moment the taste of the medicine reached their bellies, and all at once they retched together and brought up the poison, and got their lives back.
⚠ And the second of the two readings the guard was set for. 吐出毒味 bases as tǔ, the deliberate band — and the clause immediately before it is 嘔噦, retching. 康熙 glosses the tù band with that very character, 歐也. The text supplies its own proof one clause early and the automatic reader still gets it wrong. 得了性命 keeps 得 as dé: here it is the verb itself, to obtain.
Eight Rules was the first to crawl up. "That nearly stifled me to death!"
悶 is mèn, stifled and oppressed — not mēn, stuffy. 殺 here is a violent intensifier rather than a verb, the same use as in 笑殺人, killed laughing. He ate the most and he is up first, which is entirely in character.
Tripitaka and Sha Monk both woke. "How dizzy I am!"
Eleven characters for two men returning from the dead, and what they say is that they feel faint. The book has spent four thousand characters on this poison and gives the recovery two complaints, one apiece.
The rescue takes twenty-one characters. Prise the jaws, insert a pill, wait a moment, and they retch the poison up and are alive. After a manufacturing poem, a weighing scene, twelve dates, four cups, a three-day clock and a two-thousand-li round trip, the cure is over in one sentence.
The verb doing the work is the one the chapter has been quietly splitting all the way through. 吐 appears seven times: three when the spiders send silk out on purpose, four when poisoned men bring things up helplessly. Two bands, one character, and 康熙 has kept them apart since 1716 — 寫也 against 歐也.
And the first thing anybody says on coming back to life is a complaint about how they feel. 悶殺我也 from the one who ate three dates in a gulp, 好暈也 from the two who drank politely. Nobody thanks anybody yet. That takes another passage.