看守門戶 To Watch My Gate
行者指道：「他在那殿外立定裝瞎子哩。」八戒拿鈀就築，又被毘藍止住道：「天蓬息怒。大聖知我洞裡無人，待我收他去看守門戶也。」行者指道：「他在那殿外立定装瞎子哩。」八戒拿钯就筑，又被毘蓝止住道：「天蓬息怒。大圣知我洞里无人，待我收他去看守门户也。」
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim pointed. "There he stands outside the hall, shamming blind."
He repeats the accusation he made to the man's face — 裝瞎子, putting on an act of blindness — and it is still wrong. 立定 is to stand fixed, rooted; the Daoist has not moved since the needle came down.
Eight Rules took up his rake to strike, and again Vairambha stopped him. "Marshal Tianpeng, let your anger rest."
鈀 is pá, the muckrake, and 築 is to ram or tamp — the verb for driving a post into the ground. 天蓬 is Eight Rules's celestial title from before his fall. She addresses him by it, which is a courtesy nobody else in the chapter extends him, and it is the second time in three passages she has caught somebody's arm.
"The Great Sage knows there is nobody in my cave. Let me take him back to watch the gate for me."
看守 takes 看 as kān — to guard, to mind, to look after — not the kàn of looking at something, which is the reading at every other one of this chapter's occurrences. And 收 is to take into service, the word for recruiting a subordinate spirit. She is not going to punish him. She is going to employ him.
She stops a second killing, and this time she has a use for the prisoner. 洞裡無人 — there is nobody in my cave — is the observation Pilgrim made himself when he walked in, and she has evidently been thinking about it.
Employing your defeated enemy as a gatekeeper is one of the novel's steadiest resolutions, and it is worth understanding why. In a universe run as a bureaucracy, a demon is not evil so much as unposted — a being of real power with no place in the hierarchy. Give it a post and the problem is solved. Half the monsters in this book end up as somebody's mount, doorkeeper or attendant.
And she calls Eight Rules 天蓬, Marshal Tianpeng. He has been a pig for the whole book and a punchline for most of this chapter, and the bodhisattva addresses him by the rank he held in Heaven. It costs her two characters and it is the only respect he is shown in seven thousand.