把肚皮剖開 The Belly Opens
假僧接刀在手，解開衣服，挺起胸膛，將左手抹腹，右手持刀，唿喇的響一聲，把肚皮剖開，那裡頭就骨都都的滾出一堆心來。諕得文官失色，武將身麻。國丈在殿上見了道：「這是個多心的和尚。」假僧接刀在手，解开衣服，挺起胸膛，将左手抹腹，右手持刀，唿喇的响一声，把肚皮剖开，那里头就骨都都的滚出一堆心来。諕得文官失色，武将身麻。国丈在殿上见了道：「这是个多心的和尚。」
逐句解 Line by line
The false monk took the knife in his hand, undid his robe, thrust out his chest, drew his left hand across his belly and held the knife in his right; with a rrrip he slit the skin of his belly open, and out of it came tumbling and glugging a whole heap of hearts.
唿喇 and 骨都都 are both sound words, and the sentence runs on them. The first, hū lā, is the tearing noise; the second, gǔ dū dū, is the bubbling, tumbling noise of things pouring out — the same word family as the glug of a bottle emptying. ⚠ 都 is dū in that sound word, not the dōu that means "all."
The civil officers were frightened pale and the military officers went numb.
諕 is xià, a variant of 嚇, to frighten — the reading is fixed throughout this edition and it is not háo. 諕得 takes de, the little connector that hangs a result on a verb: frightened until they lost colour. 將 is jiàng here, a military officer, not the jiāng that introduces an object.
The Royal Father-in-Law, seeing it from the hall above, said, "This is a monk of many hearts."
多心 is the line to watch. In ordinary Chinese it means over-suspicious, reading slights into things — you would say it to a friend who thinks everyone is against them. The Royal Father-in-Law means it as a sneer. He is also, without meaning to, describing exactly what is on the floor.
The novel is not squeamish and does not hurry. We get the robe, the chest, the left hand, the right hand, the noise, and only then the hearts. Slowing the sentence down like this is what makes the pay-off land: the reader has time to brace for blood and gets a pile of abstractions instead.
The scene is a deliberate echo. Thirty-three chapters earlier, in the contest with the three Daoist immortals, Wukong had his own belly cut open in public — and that scene uses the very same ox-ear dagger and the same tearing noise before the skin gives way. There the joke was that he could put his guts back; here it is that there were never any guts to begin with.
The two sound words are the making of the passage. They are not decoration; they are how a storyteller working out loud, in front of a paying audience, would hold a room. Read the sentence aloud and the performance is still audible in it after four hundred years.
The Royal Father-in-Law's one-line comment is the finest thing in the scene. He is trying to be witty at the monk's expense, and the joke he reaches for — "you are over-suspicious" — happens to be literally true. He has about two minutes left.