吐霧噴雲 Mist Spat And Cloud Blown
逐句解 Line by line
These three are unbeatable champions guarding a true monk; those three are wild goblins wrecking the Law and cheating their king.
將 is jiàng here, a general or champion, not jiāng, the grammatical particle — this book keeps the two apart without exception. 欺君, cheating the ruler, is a capital charge in law, and the chapter title uses the same 欺 of what the fiends do to the original nature.
At the outset it was bearable; toward the end it grew fiercer.
Eight characters that do the work of a paragraph. The poem is compressing time, and warning you that the fight is about to go badly.
All six used the art of rising into the void, and up in the cloudland each one tumbled and rolled.
六枚, six pieces, uses a measure word normally kept for small round objects — coins, seals, eggs. Applied to six combatants it is faintly comic, as though they were being counted out of a bag.
In an instant, mist spat and cloud blown, heaven and earth went dark, and only the roaring and the howling could be heard.
哮 is xiào, a howl or a roar. The line ends with a sensory trick worth pausing on: the poem blacks out the picture and leaves you with sound, which is why the last three characters are all noise.
The poem finally states the moral scoreboard, and it does so in the most political language available. Wrecking the Law and cheating the king are the charges an official would file, not the ones a monk would. The fiends have taken a kingdom, so the poem judges them as usurpers.
Then the fight leaves the ground, and the writing changes with it. Once everyone is airborne the poem stops naming individuals and starts counting them as a lump — all six, tumbling. The pairings dissolve.
The blackout at the end is the best thing in the poem. Darkness falls, the picture goes, and the reader is left listening to a fight they can no longer see. That is exactly the state the next paragraph will exploit, because it is in the dark that Bajie's ears become a fatal problem.