鐵棒當頭 Iron Against Crutch
逐句解 Line by line
Meeting the Great Sage, who showed his divine power, / he seized the fiend and saved the people, and the knot would be untied.
相逢 takes xiāng, the mutual reading — the two of them meeting each other, not one man's appearance. 將難解 reads as a promise: the difficulty is about to be undone.
The iron rod came down on his head in real earnest, / the crutch-staff came up to meet it and drew a cheer.
著實 is zhuó shí — in earnest, for real, laying it on. The 著 takes zhuó, the lexical reading, not the zhe of an action in progress. 喝采 is hè again, shouting: the word for an audience roaring approval, which quietly tells you the fight has spectators.
They fought till fog filled the whole sky and darkened the moat and wall, / and in the town the households all went pale.
殺得 takes de, the connector that hangs a result on a verb: they fought until the sky filled with fog. 城池, wall-and-moat, is the standard word for a walled town — the defences standing in for the place itself, the way "hearth" once stood for a home.
The poem now widens out from the two fighters to the city underneath them, and it keeps widening for the rest of the run: households, then officials, then the women of the palace, then the king. Each couplet drops one rung down the social ladder while the fight goes on overhead.
The cheer in the second couplet is a small oddity worth pausing on. Nobody in Bhikṣu is enjoying this. The word belongs to the storyteller's own room — his listeners are the ones cheering, and for one line the poem lets them into the sky.