The Monkey King, cudgel in hand, came running up and parted the grass to seek the snake — but where was he to find any trace of it?

拿著 takes the unstressed zhe of a hold kept up. 撥草尋蛇, "part the grass and look for the snake", is a set phrase for hunting out something hidden — and here, for once, the idiom is describing exactly what a man is literally doing on his hands and knees. 那裡 is the rhetorical question, nǎ: "where was he to find—?" 影響 has its older meaning here, "shadow and echo", that is, any sign at all — not the modern sense of influence.

He grew so frantic that the Three Corpse-gods shrieked within him and smoke burst from his seven orifices. He recited the syllable oṃ,

The frustration is measured in physiology. The 三尸 are the Three Corpse-worms: in Daoist belief, three parasites lodged in the body's three cinnabar fields, who report your sins to Heaven and whose agitation is the standard shorthand for feeling beside yourself. The 七竅 are the seven openings of the head — eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth — and smoke coming out of all of them is still, in Chinese, what you say about someone incandescent with rage. 咋 is read zhà, to cry out; 急得 takes the unstressed de. Then 唵 ǎn, which renders the Sanskrit oṃ, the syllable of summoning — and with that, the monkey stops looking and starts issuing orders.

and summoned forth at once the Local God of that ward and the Mountain God of that place, who came and knelt together, saying: "The Mountain God and the Local God attend you."

當坊 is "of this ward", 當 read dāng. A 土地 is the tutelary earth-god of one small place and a 山神 the god of one mountain: the humblest grade in the celestial civil service, roughly a parish clerk with supernatural powers and no discretion at all. They are also the officials Wukong most enjoys bullying.

Said the Pilgrim: "Stick out your ankle-bones and take five strokes apiece by way of greeting, to relieve old Sun's feelings."

孤拐 gū guǎi is the ankle-bone; 見面 is "by way of a first meeting"; 散心 is to divert oneself, to work off a vexation. The comedy is entirely in the register: a beating offered as a social courtesy, five strokes each, in the tone of a man proposing a round of drinks.

The two gods knocked their heads on the ground and pleaded: "We beg the Great Sage to be indulgent, and let us humble gods state our case."

叩頭 is to knock the forehead on the ground. 方便 fāng biàn is a Buddhist technical term — upāya, the skilful means by which a teaching is adapted to whoever needs it — but it long ago slid into everyday use for indulgence or accommodation, which is how it is meant here. 小神, "this humble god", is the self-abasing pronoun of a minor deity, and there is a whole hierarchy audible in it.

Said the Pilgrim: "What have you to say?"

甚麼 shén me, "what": 甚 takes shén.

The two gods said: "The Great Sage lay long imprisoned, and we humble gods did not know when he had come forth; therefore we failed to receive him. We beg a thousand pardons."

一向久困 points back to Wukong's five hundred years pinned under the Mountain of Five Phases. 接得 takes the unstressed de, on the pattern of 聞得 and 聽得 earlier. 萬望恕罪 is "ten thousand times we beg pardon". The excuse is that nobody told them he had been let out — which is very funny and also, as a picture of how a large bureaucracy actually works, entirely convincing.

Said the Pilgrim: "In that case I will not beat you for now.

且 is "for the present". The reprieve is provisional, as Wukong's reprieves generally are.

I ask you: this monstrous dragon in Eagle-Grief Gorge — from what quarter does it come?

那方 is a question — "from which quarter?" — so nǎ.

How comes it to have snatched my master's white horse and eaten it?"

搶 qiǎng, to snatch, is the same verb used of the dragon's first lunge out of the water at the elder.

The two gods said: "The Great Sage has never had a master.

自來 is "all along, from of old". The gods are not being sarcastic; they are genuinely bewildered. Nothing in their filing suggests that this creature could have acquired a master, and the measure of how new the pilgrimage still is that Heaven's own local staff have not caught up with it.

You have always been a Perfected One of Primal Chaos, who bowed neither to Heaven nor to Earth. However should you come to have any master's horse at all?"

不伏天不伏地 is "bows to neither Heaven nor Earth"; 混元上真, "Supreme Perfected One of Primal Chaos", is a lofty Daoist title, and laying it on with a trowel is exactly what a frightened subordinate does. 得 is here dé, "come to have"; 甚麼 takes shén. Read it twice and notice that the flattery is also, precisely, the charge sheet.

Said the Pilgrim: "You do not know the half of it.

是也不知 is "indeed do not know". What follows is the closest thing to candour Wukong offers anybody in this chapter — and he offers it to two terrified parish officials rather than to his own master.

For that business of deceiving my superiors I served out a full five hundred years of bitter tribulation.

為 is read wèi, "on account of". 誑上, "deceiving those above", was the formal charge against him; 勾當 gòu dàng is an affair or piece of business, usually with something shady about it. 苦難 takes 難 as nàn, tribulation — the same word that bound him to the dragon in the rhapsody.

Now, by the grace of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, who exhorted me to goodness, I was set free by a true monk of the Tang court, whom she charged to deliver me;

著 here is causative and read zhuó: to have someone do a thing. 唐朝 takes 朝 as cháo, a dynasty or court, not the zhāo of "morning" seen in the opening poem. 駕下, "beneath the imperial carriage", is a formal way of saying "of the emperor's court".

and she bade me follow him as his disciple and go to the Western Heaven, to worship the Buddha and seek the scriptures.

教 is causative, jiào. 西天, "the Western Heaven", means India. In 拜佛求經 the character 佛 is always read fó.

Passing this way, we have lost my master's white horse."

A flat closing statement of the grievance, and the plainness tells after the grandeur of the sentence before it. Five hundred years of penance, a Bodhisattva, an imperial commission — and we have lost the horse.

The two gods said: "So that is how it stands.

原來 is "so that is how it stands" — the formula of a penny dropping, and the cue for the explanation the reader has been waiting several pages for.

There has never been any evil thing in this gorge. Only it is deep and sheer and broad, and the sheen of its water is clear to the very floor, so that crows and magpies dare not fly across it;

深陡寬闊 is deep, sheer, broad; 徹底澄清, clear clean through to the bottom. 鴉鵲 are crows and magpies. 中 is here zhōng. Note what the sentence is doing: it opens by clearing the gorge of any suspicion — there has never been an evil thing here — and then explains that the water kills birds anyway.

for the water is so clear that they see their own shapes reflected there, and take them for birds of their own flock, and again and again fling their bodies into the water.

And here is the real reason for the name. 形影 is "form and shadow"; 認做 is to mistake one thing for another; 身擲於水內 is to hurl the body into the water. The birds see themselves in perfectly clear water, take the reflection for company, and dive to join it. What kills them is not vanity — they are not admiring anything — but a plain mistake about what is real, made by creatures with no way of telling.

And so it is called Eagle-Grief Steep Gorge.

The etymology is offered with some relish, and it overturns the tidy version from the start of the chapter. The gorge is not named for a hawk's fear of its depth. It is named for the birds its deadly clearness drowns. This is a place, in other words, where seeing truly and seeing falsely look precisely the same — which is worth holding on to, because two creatures have just spent an afternoon fighting in it over a mistake about who the other one was.

Only in a former year the Bodhisattva Guanyin, going in search of a scripture-seeker, saved a jade dragon,

向年間 is "in a former year"; 因為 takes 為 as wèi, "on account of". 玉龍, "jade dragon", is the creature's proper style rather than a description — the first hint that the monster is not a monster and is already spoken for.

and sent it to dwell here, bidding it await that scripture-seeker, and forbidding it to do wrong or work mischief.

教 is causative, jiào. Then a nice piece of evidence for how hard 為 works in this chapter: in 為非作歹, "do wrong and work mischief", it is read wéi, to do — whereas a dozen characters earlier, in 因為, it was wèi, for the sake of. The same character twice in one short speech, and two different words.

Only when hungry does it come up on the bank to pounce on a few birds for food, or catch a river-deer or a stag to eat.

撲 is to pounce on; 獐 zhāng is the river-deer or musk-deer. This is the diet of an animal keeping to its licence: birds and small deer, nothing that belongs to anybody. Until the white horse.

We cannot think how it came to be so senseless as to give offence to the Great Sage today."

無知 is "without understanding"; 衝撞 is to give offence, to run foul of somebody. Watch where the two gods place the blame. Every word of it falls on the dragon, and not a syllable on the Bodhisattva who put the dragon there.

Said the Pilgrim: "The first time, he still crossed hands with old Sun and wheeled through several bouts;

還 here is hái, "still, even so". 侮手 is to try hands with somebody, to spar; 幾合 is several bouts.

the second time, when old Sun stood bawling abuse, he would not come out again.

叫罵 is to bawl abuse; 再不出, "would not come out again". This is the deafness that provoked the churning of the water, and Wukong is still describing it as the other party's fault.

So I worked a spell for overturning rivers and churning seas, and muddied the water of his gorge; and out he came leaping, still bent on contending.

法兒 is a trick or a spell. In 攛將上來 the 將 is the hinge before the direction word; 還要 takes 還 as hái, "still wanted to".

But he did not reckon how heavy old Sun's cudgel is. He could not fend it off, and turned into a water-snake and bored away into the grass.

棍重 reads 重 as zhòng, heavy — not chóng, "again". 遮架不住 is "could not parry and hold". The staff weighs thirteen thousand five hundred catties, a figure the novel never lets its readers forget for long.

I came chasing after to look for him, but there is no trace."

蹤跡 is trace, track. The complaint ends exactly where the passage began: parted grass, and a snake that is not there.

The Local God said: "The Great Sage does not know.

大聖不知, "the Great Sage does not know", is a courteous formula for correcting a superior — the celestial equivalent of "with respect, sir". And it is this lowly earth-god, not the Monkey King, who is holding the one piece of information that matters.

This gorge has a myriad holes and passages, all running into one another, and that is why its waters lie so deep and reach so far.

孔竅 are apertures and passages; 相通 takes 相 as xiāng, running into one another; 波瀾 is billows, here the body of water itself. The gorge is honeycombed, which is why it is bottomless in every practical sense.

Doubtless there is such a hole here too, and he has bored his way down through it.

In 鑽將下去 the 將 is again the hinge before the direction word — and 鑽, to bore, is the very verb that carried the dragon up out of the water when it first took the horse. It came by drilling and it has left by drilling.

There is no need for the Great Sage to rage and hunt about here. If you would take this creature, you need only invite Guanshiyin to come, and it will submit of itself."

只消 is "you need only"; in 請將… 來 the 將 is the hinge again. 觀世音, "Perceiver of the World's Sounds", is Guanyin's fuller title, and it is quietly the right name to use in a chapter about failing to say anything worth hearing. 伏, to submit, is the word that governs everything from here to the end of the chapter — and the gods use it of a creature that force alone cannot even touch.