發喊𡅃聲 The Herd Raised a Bellow
三僧三怪賭鬥多時，不見輸贏。那辟寒大王喊一聲，叫：「小的們上來。」眾精各執兵刃齊來，早把個八戒絆倒在地，被幾個水牛精揪揪扯扯，拖入洞裡綑了。沙僧見沒了八戒，只見那群牛發喊𡅃聲。即掣寶杖，望辟塵大王虛丟了架子要走。又被群精一擁而來，拉一個躘踵，急掙不起，也被捉去綑了。三僧三怪赌斗多时，不见输赢。那辟寒大王喊一声，叫：「小的们上来。」众精各执兵刃齐来，早把个八戒绊倒在地，被几个水牛精揪揪扯扯，拖入洞里捆了。沙僧见没了八戒，只见那群牛发喊𡅃声。即掣宝杖，望辟尘大王虚丢了架子要走。又被群精一拥而来，拉一个躘踵，急挣不起，也被捉去捆了。
逐句解 Line by line
Three monks and three fiends gambled it out for a long while, and no winner could be seen.
賭鬥 — to gamble at fighting. The novel's ordinary phrase for a duel with the outcome open, and it puts the emphasis exactly where the next line needs it: nobody is winning.
Then the Cold-Averting Great King gave a shout and called, "Little ones, come up!"
The first of the three demons to be named in the fight, and the name is a job description. 辟寒 means to ward off cold, and his brothers are Heat-Averting and Dust-Averting. The first character is read bì here — it is the old word for keeping something away, the same one behind the phrase for warding off evil. Their names come from what the horns of a rhinoceros were believed to do, which is why they end this chapter as a set of horns.
The host of sprites all came at once with their weapons, and in no time they had tripped Eight Rules flat on the ground, where several water-buffalo sprites tugged and hauled him off into the cave and tied him up.
The fight was even until it stopped being a fight. Three against three is a duel; three against a crowd is an arrest. 揪揪扯扯 doubles both verbs to make the manhandling last — tugging and tugging, hauling and hauling. Eight Rules does not lose to a demon king. He loses to a mob.
Sha Monk saw that Eight Rules was gone, and saw nothing but that herd of oxen raising a shout and a bellowing din.
The chapter's rarest character sits in this line, and it is used nowhere else in the whole novel. 發喊𡅃聲 — they raised a shout and a roaring noise — and the second-to-last character is simply the sound: a mouth on the left, and on the right the element that gives the word for drums thudding in the old odes. It is a written noise, invented or near-enough, for a herd of oxen bellowing at once. There is no better translation than a loud one.
At once he drew his precious staff, made a feint at the Dust-Averting Great King and prepared to run.
虛丟了架子 is to throw a false posture — a feint, a move made to look like an attack so that you can leave. Sha Monk is the only one of the three who tries to withdraw in good order, and it does not work either.
But the host of sprites came crowding in on him again, dragged him into a stumble so that he struggled and could not get up, and he too was taken and bound.
躘踵 is a lovely, useless word: to stagger and go down in a heap, legs tangled. The novel is fond of it and keeps it for undignified falls — the Monkey King goes down the same way over a clod of grass in a dream in chapter 3, at 跌了個躘踵.
The battle turns, and it turns on numbers rather than on skill. For ten lines of poetry the three monks matched the three kings weapon for weapon and neither side gained. Then one demon calls up his troops, and inside two sentences Eight Rules is trussed and Sha Monk is down. The novel is quite clear that nobody was beaten in single combat.
The three kings' names are the key to the whole chapter. Cold-Averting, Heat-Averting, Dust-Averting — each named for a property the horn of a rhinoceros was supposed to have. Chinese medicine and folklore credited rhino horn with driving off cold, heat and dust, and these three demons are those beliefs walking about with weapons. It also explains the chapter's second title-line and the ending, where what the pilgrims carry away is the horns.
This passage holds the rarest word in the chapter — a character for the noise a herd of oxen makes, found nowhere else in a hundred chapters. It is spent on background noise, in a sentence about somebody looking around for his brother. That is a fair picture of how this novel handles its own vocabulary: the difficult word goes to the ox, and the plain words go to everything that matters.