Wukong cried out in a stern voice, "You have no eyes in your head at all, old man! The man of Tang is my master; I am his disciple.

The insult that starts the wordplay. 全沒眼色 is 'no eye for anything at all' — the old man is being told off not for rudeness but for failing to tell a master from a monster when both are standing in his gateway.

And I am no 'sugar-man' or 'honey-man' either — I am the Great Sage Equal to Heaven!

Here is the pun everybody remembers. The old man said 唐人, a man of Tang; Wukong hears the sound and chooses to mishear it as 糖人 — sugar-man — which is the same syllable, táng, with a different character on it, as though the objection had been about what he is made of. Then he throws in 蜜人, honey-man, which does not sound like anything at all: having found one sweet he simply reaches for another. The joke is the kind every language makes and no translation carries. In this line 甚 means 'any' and is read shén, as in 甚麼, not the emphasising shèn.

Among the folk hereabouts there are some who know me. I have seen you before, as it happens."

And having denied being a sweet, he claims an old acquaintance nobody asked about. 認得, to know or recognise, reads 得 as de.

The old man said, "Where did you ever see me?"

The question the monkey has been angling for. 你在那裡見我, 'where did you ever see me', reads 那裡 as the asking-word nǎ, 'where'.

Wukong said, "Did you not, when you were small, rake firewood before my face? Did you not gather greens upon my very cheek?"

The pay-off, and it is gloriously absurd: did you not, as a boy, rake firewood off my face and pick greens off my cheek? For five hundred years he has been a mountainside with grass on it, so in his own mind this is a perfectly literal claim. 扒柴, to rake firewood, reads 扒 as pá.

The old man said, "This fellow talks nonsense! Where did you live, and where did I live, that I should come and rake firewood and gather greens before your face?"

The old man refuses the premise and throws the asking-word 那裡 (nǎ, 'where') straight back at him. Two men shouting 'where?' at each other — the exchange has stopped being an argument and become a comic turn.

Wukong said, "It is my son here who talks nonsense. You simply do not know me:

我兒子便胡說 — 'it's my son who talks nonsense', meaning 'only a fool would'. It is a coarse jest with a sting in it, because saying it makes the old man his son. 兒子 takes the light second syllable, 子 read zi.

I am none other than the Great Sage of the stone chest in this Mountain of the Two Frontiers — look again and know me."

Joke over. He says plainly who he is: the Great Sage out of the famous stone chest, the one every child in the district has grown up hearing about. 石匣中 reads 中 as zhōng.

The old man at last came to himself and said, "You do rather resemble him. But how did you ever get out?"

The penny drops — 'you do rather look like him' — and is followed at once by the only question that matters. 省悟, to come to a realisation, reads 省 as xǐng, not shěng. 怎麼得出來的, 'how did you get out', takes 得 as dé.

Then Wukong told the old man the whole tale — how the Bodhisattva had exhorted him to virtue and bidden him wait for the Tang monk to peel the seal and set him free — recounting it all through, from first to last.

And so the whole story comes out on a doorstep: the bodhisattva's exhortation, the wait, the Tang monk, the peeled seal. It is also where the chapter's narrative body ends and the domestic interlude begins. 將 here marks what the verb acts on and is read jiāng; 那老者 reads 那 as nà.