遙見廟宇 The Shrine Sighted from the Road
三藏在馬上遙觀，忽見路傍一座莊院。三藏道：「悟空，前面人家，可以借宿，明早再行。」行者擡頭看見道：「師父，不是人家莊院。」三藏道：「如何不是？」行者道：「人家莊院，卻沒飛魚穩獸之脊，這斷是個廟宇庵院。」三藏在马上遥观，忽见路傍一座庄院。三藏道：「悟空，前面人家，可以借宿，明早再行。」行者抬头看见道：「师父，不是人家庄院。」三藏道：「如何不是？」行者道：「人家庄院，却没飞鱼稳兽之脊，这断是个庙宇庵院。」
逐句解 Line by line
Sanzang, gazing out from horseback, caught sight all at once of a farmstead beside the road.
遙觀 is to gaze into the distance. 路傍 stands here for 路旁, "beside the road", and the character 傍 is accordingly read páng. 莊院 is a walled farm compound.
Said Sanzang: "Wukong, there is a household ahead. We may beg a night's lodging there, and go on tomorrow at daybreak."
借宿 is to borrow a night's lodging. The monk's wants are, as ever, bodily and immediate. It was hunger and cold he raised while a Bodhisattva was being sent for.
The Pilgrim raised his head, looked, and said: "Master, that is no farmstead."
擡頭看見 is "raised his head and saw". Eyes that can pick out a dragonfly at a thousand 里, put to purely domestic use.
Said Sanzang: "How is it not?"
The monk's habitual scepticism — which this chapter has spent nineteen pages teaching the reader to distrust.
Said the Pilgrim: "A farmstead has no flying fish and no crouching beasts along its ridge. This is certainly a temple or a hermitage."
飛魚穩獸 are roof ornaments: the fish and beast figures ranged along a ridge-tile. They were not decoration you could simply choose to buy. Sumptuary custom reserved them for temples and official halls, so a roofline in old China worked rather like a licence plate — it told you at a glance what a building was legally entitled to be. 脊 jǐ is the roof-ridge (the same character as the spine); 庵院 is a small hermitage. Wukong reads a roofline the way a clerk reads a title-deed.
A short exchange, and a quietly telling one. Sanzang looks at a building and sees supper. Wukong looks at the same building and reads the sumptuary law written along its roofline: flying fish and crouching beasts on the ridge-tiles were the prerogative of temples and official halls, never of a peasant's house.
It is worth asking how he knows. Not from ritual codes — he has never studied any — but from having spent several hundred years climbing on roofs, stealing from palaces and breaking into places he had no business in. The knowledge is a burglar's, and it is exactly right.
The pattern holds throughout the chapter. The disciple who cannot govern his temper, who insulted a Bodhisattva and lost a horse for want of saying his own name, is nevertheless the one who reliably sees what is actually in front of him. The master, who is unfailingly courteous and thoroughly devout, sees a farmhouse.