The Pilgrim called out, "Master, day has broken. Get up." Sanzang, just waking, turned over and said, "So it has."

天亮了, "day has broken" — three characters of appalling understatement, given what the daylight is about to show. 醒覺 is to wake and become aware.

He put on his clothes, opened the door and came out — and lifting his head, saw nothing but toppled walls and reddened brick; the towers and halls were gone.

倒壁紅牆, "toppled walls and red brick" — the 紅 here is the colour fire leaves behind. 不見了樓臺殿宇: the towers and halls are simply not seen. The description that opened this chapter, hall upon hall and tier upon tier, is being unwritten line by line.

In great alarm he cried, "Ah! How is it the halls are all vanished, and everything is red walls? What is this?"

Sanzang's question is the reader's, and his disciple answers it with a jest. Note that the man who prophesied all of this — 殞身滅命，皆起於此, bodies destroyed and lives ended, and the whole of it takes its rise from here — does not recognise his own prophecy in its fulfilment.

The Pilgrim said, "You are still dreaming. A fire got away in the night." Sanzang said, "How is it I knew nothing of it?"

你還做夢哩, "you are still dreaming" (還 is hái). And then 走了火, "a fire got away" — precisely the phrase Guangmou coached the monks to use. Wukong hands his master the arsonists' own cover story, and the joke is that it is not even a lie.

The Pilgrim said, "Old Sun was guarding the meditation hall; and seeing my master deep in sleep, I did not disturb him."

濃睡 is deep sleep. He offers the fact as a kindness: he did not wake him. It is also, as it happens, the reason there was nobody awake to stop him.

Sanzang said, "If you had the power to guard the meditation hall, how is it you did not put out the fire in the other quarters?"

Sanzang asks the question the whole chapter has been waiting for, and he asks it in one breath: if you had power enough to shield this hall, why did you not put out the fire in the rest? It is unanswerable, and Wukong is about to answer it anyway — with something a good deal worse than an evasion.

The Pilgrim laughed. "Let me tell my master how it was. It fell out just as you said yesterday:

好教師父得知 ("let master be informed"): 教 is the causative jiào, 得知 takes dé. 果然依你昨日之言 — "it turned out exactly as you said yesterday." He concedes the point cheerfully now, having flatly refused it at the time it might have helped.

"they took a liking to our cassock, and laid a plan to burn us to death.

愛上 is to conceive a love for — the same verb one would use of falling for a person. 算計 is to reckon up and scheme.

"Had old Sun not perceived it, by now we should both be ashes and bones."

灰骨 is "ashes and bones"; the final 矣 gives the sentence a classical finality, like a full stop struck in stone. What Wukong claims — that the two of them would by now be dead — is exactly true.

Sanzang, hearing it, was afraid. "Was it they who set the fire?" "If not they, who?" said the Pilgrim.

不是他是誰？ "If not they, who?" The question is rhetorical, and it is about to be turned back on him with rather more justice than he expects.

Sanzang said, "Can it be that they slighted you, and this is a piece of your own work?"

怠慢 is to slight, to fail in hospitality. 勾當 is read gòu dàng, "a piece of business," and always carries a disreputable colour — "what have you been up to." Sanzang has known this disciple for two chapters, and he asks, at once, exactly the right question.