The monks said, "The Grand Master has come." Sanzang bowed from the waist, made his greeting, and said, "Venerable prior, this disciple salutes you."

師祖, "the master's master," makes every monk in the house his descendant. Sanzang, not knowing this, addresses him as 老院主, "venerable prior" — a rank too low — and the old man lets the mistake stand rather than correct a guest. 拜揖 is the bow made with joined hands.

The old monk returned the courtesy, and each was seated in his order.

還了禮: here 還 is huán, "to return, to give back," not hái, "still." Keep an eye on this character — the whole chapter is an argument about giving things back. 敘坐 is to be seated in order of rank, the same rite performed at the end of the last passage.

The old monk said, "Just now my little ones told me that a gentleman had come from the Tang court in the Land of the East, so I came out to pay my respects."

適間 is "just now." 小的們, "the little ones," is a proprietor's word for his disciples rather than a teacher's — closer to "my people" than to "my students." 唐朝 takes cháo. He came out, he says, to pay his respects. He came out, the reader may suspect, to see what had arrived.

Sanzang said, "I have come lightly to your precious mountain, not knowing good from ill. Forgive the offence, forgive the offence." "I dare not accept it," said the old monk, "I dare not."

寶山 ("precious mountain") is the courteous name for another man's monastery — and, in this house, a plain description. 不知好歹 ("not knowing good from bad") is standard self-deprecation; 不敢 ("I dare not accept it") the standard deflection of praise. Both formulae will be spoken again before the chapter ends, and neither will be a formula then.

Then he asked, "Reverend sir, from the Land of the East to this place — how long is the road?"

The question is the small change of any meeting on the road, the traveller's equivalent of asking how the drive was. It is also the exact hinge of the old man's envy: distance travelled is merit earned, and he has travelled none.

Sanzang said, "From the borders of Chang'an there were something over five thousand lǐ.

長安 is Cháng'ān — 長 is cháng here, though the same character is zhǎng in 長老, "elder." The 里 (lǐ) is left untranslated throughout: something under half a kilometre, so five thousand of them is roughly the distance from London to Delhi.

"Past the Mountain of Two Frontiers I took on a young disciple, and coming along the road

兩界山, the Mountain of Two Frontiers, is the peak under which Wukong lay pinned for five hundred years until chapter fourteen. Sanzang compresses that entire deliverance into four characters and a counting-word: 收了一眾小徒, "took on one young disciple."

we passed through Hābì, a kingdom of the Western Fan; and after two months and another five or six thousand lǐ, only now have we reached your honoured place."

西番, the "Western Fan," is a loose Ming term for the Tibetan and Central Asian peoples. 哈咇 (Hābì) is a transliterated place-name — that is, the characters were picked to spell out the sound of a foreign word and mean nothing in themselves — commonly identified with Hami; 咇 reads bì. 貴處 is "your honoured place."