智貫乾坤 Wisdom Threading Heaven and Earth
逐句解 Line by line
My name rang through the universe and every quarter knew it; my wit ran through heaven and earth and left its mark in every place.
乾坤 is heaven and earth named by the first two of the changing figures — and the first character 乾 is qián for that figure, not the dry reading the same character carries twice later in this chapter for sun-dried meat and dry mulberry wood.
Today I have had the good fortune to take refuge and follow the Buddhist teaching, and I support the elder on his westward journey.
The turn of the whole poem, and it comes at line eight of twelve. 皈依 is the formal taking of refuge that makes somebody a Buddhist. Everything before this line was a boast; everything after it is a job description.
Meeting a mountain I open the road and no one bars it; meeting water I prop up a bridge and the fiends despair.
逢山開路, meet a mountain and open a road, is half of a proverb still in use for clearing every obstacle as it comes — the other half speaks of bridging water, which is exactly what the second limb here does. Wukong is quoting a saying about persistence and applying it to himself as a job.
The poem hinges on the eighth line. For seven lines Wukong has been listing what he was — born of stone, self-refined, titled, unbeatable. Then he says he took refuge, and every line after that describes what he does for somebody else.
That is the whole shape of his character in twelve lines. He does not renounce the boasting; the road-opening and bridge-building are still boasts. But they have acquired an object, and the object is the elder on the horse.