儒教之尊 Even Confucius Is Only Master
孔聖人是儒教之尊，亦僅呼為『夫子』。你這個孽畜，敢稱甚麼『南山大王』，數百年之放蕩。不要走，吃你外公老爺一棒。」孔圣人是儒教之尊，亦仅呼为『夫子』。你这个孽畜，敢称甚么『南山大王』，数百年之放荡。不要走，吃你外公老爷一棒。」
逐句解 Line by line
The sage Confucius is the honoured one of the Confucian teaching, and even he is called no more than Master.
The third limb of the argument, and the neatest. 夫子, Master, is the ordinary respectful title for a teacher — and in it 子 is zǐ, the full-toned literary ending, the only place in the whole chapter that character takes that reading against thirty-six where it does not. The source sets these three limbs off with semicolons, but a run of three is not a matched pair and the limbs are unequal — ten characters and seven, then eight and seven, then eight and seven.
And you, you depraved beast, dare style yourself Great King of the Southern Mountain, several hundred years of running loose!
Wukong throws the fiend's own two boasts back in his own words — the title and the centuries, quoted verbatim from the challenge speech. The character 甚 is shén, what — the contemptuous what-do-you-mean rather than a real question.
Do not run off. Take a taste of your Grandpa Uncle's rod."
外公老爺 stacks two respectful terms for an older man on top of each other, which is Wukong's grandfather joke pushed one storey higher. He used the simpler form at the cave gate; here, having just delivered a lecture on precedence, he awards himself the compound title.
The three-limb argument descends deliberately: the being who made the world, the being who governs the age, and the teacher whose whole civilisation is named after him. All three accept a modest place. The point lands on the fourth term.
Then Wukong immediately gives himself an inflated title and hits somebody. The novel has just let him make an unanswerable case about humility and then act on it with a stick, and it does not draw attention to the contradiction — it simply puts the two things next to each other.