Those three old demons raised their three kinds of weapon and hastily parried him.

急架相迎 — hurriedly bringing their weapons up to meet his. A reading: 相 is xiāng, mutually, and not xiàng, a face or an appearance, which is the same graph and its reading elsewhere in this chapter.

What a fight this was, there in the mountain hollow:

好殺 is the storyteller's cue for a combat poem — literally "a fine killing." A reading: 場 is cháng here, the measure word for an event, not chǎng, a place.

Battle-axe, steel sabre and knotted vine-staff; the Monkey King with one cudgel dares come and meet them.

The battle poem opens by counting the weapons: three against one, and the one 敢來迎, dares come and meet them. The odds are stated in the first line so the last line can leave them unresolved.

The fiends Cold-Averting, Heat-Averting and Dust-Averting know the name of the Great Sage Equal to Heaven.

The poem repeats what the deposition established: they know the name. It is the second line of the fight, and it is doing the work of a scorecard — reputation is one of the things being weighed here.

The cudgel rising makes gods and ghosts afraid; the axe comes, the sabre hacks, and all is wild flying and leaping.

The couplet gives Pilgrim the effect and the demons the activity. He frightens; they swing. That asymmetry is how these poems keep score without declaring a winner.

A fine thing, this image of true emptiness with the law of primal unity, holding off the counterfeit buddha-shapes of three fiends.

The line the whole chapter has been building toward, and it puts the case in one couplet. 真空像, the image of true emptiness, against 假佛形, counterfeit buddha-shapes: true against false, 空 against 佛. 混元 is primal undifferentiated unity, a term out of Daoist cosmology. The monkey whose name means Awakened-to-Emptiness is set against three creatures whose entire trade is looking like buddhas — and the poem makes the pairing explicit rather than leaving it for a reader to find.

Those three, who steal the oil to grease their noses, have offended this year, in seeking to seize the monk commissioned by the imperial court.

偷油潤鼻 — stealing the oil to oil their noses — is the poem being rude, and precise: a rhinoceros keeps its nose moist, and these three have been doing it at a prefecture's expense. A reading: 差 is chāi, commissioned, the same band as 欽差 in chapter 4.

This one, for his master's sake, fears not the long mountain road; those ones, for their mouths' sake, set up the offering lamps year after year.

The couplet that states both motives and lets them stand side by side. 因師 — because of his master — against 為嘴, because of their mouths. Loyalty against appetite, in six graphs. A reading: 為 here is wèi, for the sake of — the causal reading, not the copular wéi that this chapter uses nine other times.

Clang and clatter — one hears only sabre and axe ringing; crack and thwack — one hears nothing but the cudgel's sound.

Two lines of pure noise. 乒乓 and 劈朴 are sound-words written down, and 乒乓 is the same pair of graphs modern Chinese uses for table tennis, for exactly the same reason.

Charging and colliding, three close in upon one; parrying and shielding, each shows what he can do.

三攢一 — three clustered onto one — is the poem finally admitting the odds it opened with. A reading: 攢 is cuán, to cluster.

They fought from morning until the sky grew late, and there was no telling which was losing and which was winning.

The poem ends on a refusal, and it is a formula: 不知那個虧輸那個贏 is almost word for word what chapter 4 does at the end of the Nezha fight, 不知那個剛強那個柔. Both instances of 那 are nǎ, the indefinite "which" — chapter 4 seals the identical construction.