清奇幽雅 Three Gates And A Dais
不多時，行入二層門裡看時，呀！這裡卻比外面不同：清奇幽雅，秀麗寬平；左右有瑤草仙花，前後有喬松翠竹。又行七八里遠近，才到三層門。閃著身，偷著眼看處，那上面高坐三個老妖，十分獰惡。不多时，行入二层门里看时，呀！这里却比外面不同：清奇幽雅，秀丽宽平；左右有瑶草仙花，前后有乔松翠竹。又行七八里远近，才到三层门。闪着身，偷着眼看处，那上面高坐三个老妖，十分狞恶。
逐句解 Line by line
Before long he had walked in through the second gate, and when he looked — oh!
呀 is a bare noise of surprise, and the book gives it a whole exclamation mark to itself. After the charnel yard, the reader is braced for worse. That is the point of the noise.
Inside was nothing like outside: clear and strange and quietly elegant, handsome and broad and level;
And the surprise is that it is lovely. Every one of these eight characters belongs to the vocabulary of garden appreciation — the words a Ming reader would expect on a scroll about a scholar's retreat, not a monster's front hall.
To left and right, jade grasses and immortals' flowers; before and behind, tall pines and kingfisher-green bamboo.
瑤草仙花 is the standard furniture of a Daoist paradise, and pine and bamboo are two of the Three Friends of Winter, the stock emblems of a gentleman's constancy. The demons have decorated in impeccable taste, roughly a hundred paces from the flensing yard.
Another seven or eight lǐ or so, and only then the third gate.
A 里 lǐ in Ming reckoning is 180 丈 zhàng, a little under six hundred metres, so this is a walk of four kilometres and more — inside a cave. Demon caves in this book are routinely bigger on the inside, and nobody in the story ever remarks on it.
Slipping into cover and stealing a look, he saw three old fiends enthroned up there, savage-looking in the extreme.
Both 著 here are the light zhe that keeps an action running underneath the main one — hugging the wall while he goes, peering as he goes. It is the same particle in 閃著身 and 偷著眼, and it turns a sentence into a tracking shot.
This is a joke about interior decoration and it is also the chapter's thesis. The demons of this cave are not beasts in a den. They keep a butcher's yard at the door and a scholar's garden behind it, and they see no contradiction. Real power in this novel almost always looks like this — the atrocity and the good taste occupying the same address.
Three gates, and the dais only at the third. The book is walking Wukong inward through a layout borrowed straight from an imperial palace or a great monastery, where rank is measured by how many courtyards a visitor is allowed to cross. He is not sneaking into a lair. He is being processed through a court.
Hold on to that as the portraits start. Everything about to be described is described from Wukong's hiding place, through one stolen glance — which means the three most elaborate poems in the chapter are, technically, a reconnaissance report.