見一仗 Let Bajie Meet Him First
他道：「我且回去，照顧豬八戒照顧，教他來先與這妖精見一仗。若是八戒有本事，打倒這妖，算了造化；若無手段，被這妖拿去，等我再去救他，才好出名。他道：「我且回去，照顾猪八戒照顾，教他来先与这妖精见一仗。若是八戒有本事，打倒这妖，算了造化；若无手段，被这妖拿去，等我再去救他，才好出名。
逐句解 Line by line
He said, "I will go back down and do Zhu Bajie a good turn — a really good turn — and get him to come and have the first bout with this fiend.
照顧豬八戒照顧 wraps the object inside a doubled verb, a vernacular shape that makes the favour sound generous and slightly too insistent. In English the nearest thing is saying it twice with a straight face. 見一仗 is to meet for one engagement.
If Bajie has the skill for it and knocks the fiend down, that is his good fortune;
造化 is the great making-and-transforming of the world, and in speech it drifted all the way down to plain good luck. 倒 is dǎo here, knocked over. The clause ends on a semicolon, and the sentence after it is not its match.
if he has no skill and the fiend carries him off, then I go and rescue him, and that will make a good name for me.
The two halves look like a matched pair and are not. The first offers one outcome in three clauses; this one runs to four and climbs — Bajie loses, Bajie is captured, Pilgrim rescues him, Pilgrim is admired. The second half is not the alternative to the first. It is the plan.
Read the two conditions again. Heads, Bajie wins and gets the credit; tails, Bajie is captured and Pilgrim gets the credit. Only one of those outcomes has Pilgrim in it, and it is the one where his brother is carried off by a fiend with forty imps.
The chapter title calls this envy. Whether that is fair is a question the novel leaves open, but the scheming is on the page in Pilgrim's own words, and he has just been certified by the narrator as a man who does not scheme.