吊下淚來 He Weeps For His Master
孤拐燒軟了，弄做個殘疾之人了。」忍不住吊下淚來。這正是：孤拐烧软了，弄做个残疾之人了。」忍不住吊下泪来。这正是：
逐句解 Line by line
"My ankle is burned soft. I am made a cripple."
殘疾之人 — a man with a lasting injury. Of all the things that have happened to him in this book, permanent damage is the one he has never had to think about.
He could not hold it in, and the tears came down.
Five characters, and they are among the most significant in the chapter. 忍不住, could not hold it in, is the same phrase the book used for the laugh that gave him away — the identical failure of self-control, turned inside out.
And this was just the case of:
The tag that always precedes a verse. It may never be parted from the lines it introduces.
Meeting the demon and meeting with hardship, he thinks of Xuanzang; running into trouble and facing peril, he worries for the holy monk.
A strictly matched pair: 遭魔 answers 著難, 遇苦 answers 臨危, and the two names for the same man close each line. 著 is zháo here, to run into or catch — the same reading as in catching cold — because the parallel demands a verb of encountering. This is a matched couplet rather than a rhyming one, so the line ends contrast in tone and are not meant to chime.
Wukong crying is rare enough to be an event. He has been crushed under a mountain, had a headband tightened on his skull, and been thrown out by his own master twice, and the book is sparing with his tears. What breaks him here is not the pain but the thought that he cannot finish the job.
The couplet makes the argument explicit and it is the argument of the whole novel. Both lines have the same shape: something terrible happens to Wukong, and the second half of the line is about Xuanzang. The Mind-Monkey's education is very nearly complete, and this is what completion looks like — trapped, burnt, weeping, and thinking about somebody else.