原文 Original text
繁體 Traditional
Reader's edition
跌落塵埃 The Fall Into The Dust
大聖聞言，著力氣蹬了一蹬。那老魔從空中拍剌剌，似紡車兒一般跌落塵埃。就把那山坡下死硬的黃土跌做個二尺淺深之坑。大圣闻言，着力气蹬了一蹬。那老魔从空中拍剌剌，似纺车儿一般跌落尘埃。就把那山坡下死硬的黄土跌做个二尺浅深之坑。
逐句解 Line by line
大聖聞言，著力氣蹬了一蹬。
大圣闻言，着力气蹬了一蹬。
The Great Sage heard this, and put his strength into a downward stamp on the cord.
著 reads zhuó in 著力 — to apply force. This is the physical, lexical band of the character, not the ending that marks an action in progress.
那老魔從空中拍剌剌，似紡車兒一般跌落塵埃。
那老魔从空中拍剌剌，似纺车儿一般跌落尘埃。
Down came the old fiend out of the air with a clatter, spinning like a spinning wheel, and fell into the dust.
拍剌剌 is a noise word for the tumble. 紡車兒 is a spinning wheel, and the comparison is to how it turns, not to how it looks.
就把那山坡下死硬的黃土跌做個二尺淺深之坑。
就把那山坡下死硬的黄土跌做个二尺浅深之坑。
He struck the dead hard yellow earth at the foot of the slope and made a pit two chi deep.
尺 stays as chǐ, about 32 centimetres, so the pit is roughly two thirds of a metre deep.
The demons have just compared their king to a kite, and Wukong, who has heard them, immediately brings him down. The novel does not spell out that he is playing to the audience, but the sequence makes it plain: the joke is made, and Wukong provides the punchline.
The spinning wheel is the right comparison and a slightly domestic one. It is the commonest machine in a Ming household, found wherever there was thread to be made, and reaching for it puts the demon's fall in the register of kitchen mishap rather than of battle. A great chieftain of monsters is falling out of the sky like a dropped bobbin.
The pit is measured because the novel wants a fact rather than an impression: two chi, about two thirds of a metre, in ground described as dead hard. That is the detail an audience remembers. It also quietly establishes how hard he hit, which matters, because in the next passage his brothers arrive to beg.