辟開水逕 He Cleft a Water Path Open
好大聖，掄著棒，捻著訣，辟開水逕，直入波濤深處，只見那三個妖魔在水底下與井木犴、角木蛟捨死忘生苦鬥哩。他跳近前喊道：「老孫來也。」那妖精抵住二星官，措手不及，正在危難之處，忽聽得行者叫喊，顧殘生，撥轉頭往海心裡飛跑。原來這怪頭上角極能分水，只聞得花花花，沖開明路。這後邊二星官並孫大聖並力追之。好大圣，抡着棒，捻着诀，辟开水径，直入波涛深处，只见那三个妖魔在水底下与井木犴、角木蛟舍死忘生苦斗哩。他跳近前喊道：「老孙来也。」那妖精抵住二星官，措手不及，正在危难之处，忽听得行者叫喊，顾残生，拨转头往海心里飞跑。原来这怪头上角极能分水，只闻得花花花，冲开明路。这后边二星官并孙大圣并力追之。
逐句解 Line by line
Splendid Great Sage! He swung his rod, worked a finger-sign, cleft open a path through the water and went straight into the depths of the waves — and there were the three fiends under the water, fighting for dear life against the Well Wood Hound and the Horn Wood Dragon.
The chapter's single most interesting reading sits in this line, and it is the one place where the standing table is wrong. 辟 here is not the bì of the three kings' names — Cold-Averting, Heat-Averting, Dust-Averting — which is what it is at twenty-two of its twenty-three sites in this chapter. Here it stands for a different character altogether, meaning to cleave or open up, and is read pì. The great Kangxi dictionary of 1716 licenses it outright, quoting Mencius on opening up new territory. Then note the last character of 辟開水逕: it is one component away from the character this same chapter uses five times for an ordinary road, and nothing but the eye distinguishes them.
He sprang forward and shouted, "Old Monkey is here!"
Four characters, and they are the ones he has been shouting since the first chapter. 老孫來也 — the arrival announced in the third person.
Those fiends were holding off the two star officers and hard put to it, in the very thick of their difficulty, when suddenly they heard Pilgrim shout; and looking to what was left of their lives, they turned their heads and fled away into the middle of the sea.
措手不及 — no time to get a hand to it, caught unprepared. It is still in daily use. 顧殘生, looking to what remains of a life, is a bleaker phrase than the earlier "each look to his own life" — by now they are counting what is left.
It turned out that the horns on those creatures' heads are extremely good at parting water, and there was nothing to be heard but a rush and a rush and a rush as they opened a clear road ahead.
The rhinoceros horn doing the thing rhinoceros horn is supposed to do. 極能分水 — extremely able to divide water — is an old belief about the creature, and the chapter has built its whole ending on it. 花花花 is the sound, written three times, of water being pushed aside at speed. It means nothing; it is a noise.
Behind them, the two star officers and the Great Sage Sun put their strength together and chased.
Fourteen characters to end the passage on. 並力 — strength joined — and the chase is now three against three, underwater.
The chase goes under the sea, and the novel spends its detail on how everybody gets through the water. Pilgrim cleaves a path with a spell. The rhinoceroses do it with their heads, because a rhinoceros horn was believed to part water, and that belief is what gave the three demons their names and this chapter its plot.
The opening line carries the chapter's one genuine dictionary problem. The character that begins the three kings' names — the one meaning to ward off — is written identically to a different character meaning to cleave open, and the novel uses the same written form for both. Twenty-two times in this chapter it is the warding-off word; once, here, it is the cleaving word. A table that insists the character has only one reading gets this line wrong.
There is a second trap in the same six characters. The word for the path he opens is written with a character that differs by one component from another the chapter uses five times for an ordinary road — and both are perfectly common characters, so nothing flags the difference. It is the sort of thing a typesetter fixes by accident and nobody notices for four hundred years.