The Pilgrim looked them over one by one — all of them things of flowered weave and patched brocade, of embroidery and beaten gold thread — and laughed. "Good, good, good.

穿花納錦 and 刺繡銷金 are four-graph phrases for costly needlework — flowers threaded through the weave, brocade set in panels, embroidery, gold beaten into thread. 都 is dōu. The triple 好 is not admiration but dismissal: this is a creature who has walked through the treasuries of Heaven.

"Put them away, put them away. Now fetch out ours as well, and let us have a look."

收起 ("pack them up") ends the display before the monks have finished mounting it. And then 我們的 — "ours." Two graphs, and the monastery is doomed.

Sanzang caught the Pilgrim by the sleeve and said softly, "Disciple, do not vie in riches with other men.

扯住, to catch by the sleeve; 悄悄, softly, as at the gate. 鬥富 ("to contend in wealth") names the sin with precision: not the owning of a treasure but the showing of it against another man's.

"You and I are alone and abroad; I fear only that something may go amiss." "What can go amiss," said the Pilgrim, "in looking at a cassock?"

單身在外, "single-bodied and abroad" — without kin, without recourse. 差錯 is read chācuò ("a slip, a mishap"); 差 is chā here, neither chà nor chāi. Wukong catches up his master's 有錯 and hands it back as a question.

Sanzang said, "You have not understood it. The men of old had a saying: things rare and precious, things kept for delight, must never be let fall beneath the eyes of the greedy and the false.

理會得 takes the neutral de. The maxim belongs to no classic; it is the accumulated prudence of the Chinese household, and Sanzang cites it with 古人有云 exactly as he would cite a sūtra. 玩好 (wánhào), objects kept for pleasure.

"Once such a thing has passed before the eye, it must stir the heart; and the heart once stirred, a scheme must be born of it.

A chain of four clauses, each seizing the verb of the last: 入目 → 動其心 → 動其心 → 生其計. The syntax is that of the classical maxim, and the prophecy is exact — 動了奸心 will be the narrator's own phrase for the old monk two passages hence, and 此計絕妙 his phrase for the scheme.

"If you are a man who fears calamity, then when they demand it, comply with their asking — and it may pass. If not, then bodies are destroyed and lives are ended, and the whole of it takes its rise from here. The matter is no small one."

The register shifts without warning into literary Chinese — 汝, 索之, 可也, 不然則, 矣 — as though Sanzang were reading aloud from a book. 應 is yìng, "to comply with." He is right in every particular, and he is about to be overruled.

"Rest easy, rest easy," said the Pilgrim. "It all rests on old Sun's shoulders."

都在老孫身上 — "it all rests upon old Sun's body," the vernacular guarantee. He means it, and he will keep it: the fire will be shut out, the cassock recovered, the promise honoured to the letter. The monastery will nonetheless be ash.