Among them were two monks of bolder spirit, who said, "Your Worship, you were burned to death in the meditation hall.

膽量大的 is "the large of gall" — in Chinese physiology courage sits in the gall-bladder, not the heart, which is why a brave man is big-gallbladdered and a coward has none. 量 is liàng, the noun. Only two men out of two hundred and thirty are brave enough to address the thing they take for a ghost.

"Now you come again to ask for the cassock. Are you truly a man, or a ghost?"

端的 ("truly, in fact") takes duān dì. 還是人，是鬼？ — 還 is hái, "after all." Two men have walked unharmed out of a hall that was heaped with firewood and set alight, and the monks want to know whether they are alive or dead. It is a perfectly reasonable question. It is also, of all the questions available to them this morning, the wrong one.

The Pilgrim laughed. "You pack of sinful brutes! Where has there been any fire? Go and look at the meditation hall in front, and then come back and talk."

孽畜 is "sin-beasts," creatures whose animal birth is the fruit of past evil. And Wukong tells them to go and look — which is the one instruction nobody in this monastery has been capable of following all night.

The monks scrambled up and went forward to look. The doors, the windows, the lattice-leaves on the outside of that meditation hall — not half a part of them had been so much as scorched.

槅扇 (gé shàn) are the latticed leaves of a Chinese door, the most burnable thing in any building. 更不曾燎灼了半分: not scorched by half a part. The proof of the miracle is a door-frame — and the shield that saved it was borrowed from Heaven by the creature who then blew the fire the other way.

The crowd was struck with awe, and knew at last that Sanzang was a monk of the gods, and the Pilgrim a guardian of the Law.

認得 takes a neutral de. 種神僧 is a monk of the divine kind; 尊護法 an honoured Dharma-protector. They arrive at the correct theology by way of an unburnt window.

Together they came forward and knocked their heads. "We have eyes but no pupils in them; we did not know that True Men had come down to the world.

有眼無珠 — "eyes but no pupils in them," blind to what is directly in front of you — is still one of the commonest self-reproaches in Chinese, and it is exactly the right one here. It is the same organ the old monk blamed when he could not see the cassock by lamplight. 真人下界, "Perfected Men come down to the world," is a Daoist formula, used in a Chan monastery, about a Buddhist pilgrim.

"Your cassock is at the back, in the abbot's quarters, with our old Grand Master."

And here is the sentence they have been dreading having to say. 在後面方丈中老師祖處哩 — the cassock is exactly where it has been all night: with the old man, behind the one door in the whole compound that the fire could not reach.

Sanzang walked through three or four courses of ruined wall and broken brick, sighing without ceasing.

敗壁破牆 is ruined walls and broken brick. 嗟嘆不已 is sighing without end. It is Sanzang's only response to the destruction, and it is more than anyone else in the chapter will offer.

He found the abbot's quarters indeed untouched by fire. The monks rushed inside, calling,

搶入裡面 — they rush in, and the verb 搶 is the same one used of their snatching at cooking-pots in the ashes an hour ago.

"Grandfather! The Tang monk is a divine man. He has not burned to death, and now we have destroyed nothing but our own property.

家當 is read jiā dàng, "household property." Listen to the arithmetic: the Tang monk did not burn, therefore we have destroyed nothing but our own goods. Two hundred and thirty men have just discovered that they are not murderers, and are appalled to find that they are merely paupers.

"Bring out the cassock at once, and give it back to him."

還他去也: 還 is huán, give it back. Twelve hours ago it was borrowed for a single night's viewing, on a promise, with the morning named as the hour of return. The monks are now shouting through a door for it, and the man behind the door cannot produce it.