老僧出見 The Aged Abbot Appears
那院主獻了茶，又安排齋供。天光尚早，三藏稱謝未畢，只見那後面有兩個小童，攙著一個老僧出來。看他怎生打扮：那院主献了茶，又安排斋供。天光尚早，三藏称谢未毕，只见那后面有两个小童，搀着一个老僧出来。看他怎生打扮：
逐句解 Line by line
The prior served tea, and had a meatless meal made ready as well.
齋供 is the meatless offering-meal, set before monks and before images alike; 供 is read gòng, the noun "offering," not gōng. Note that the prior produces tea and food before either has been asked for. Hospitality is this house's one unfeigned virtue, and it never lapses, not even later tonight.
The daylight was still early, and Sanzang had not finished giving his thanks, when from the rear two young pages came out supporting an old monk between them. Look how he was got up:
稱謝 (chēng xiè) is to voice one's thanks. In 攙著 the particle is zhe: the pages hold him up as they walk, a state kept going rather than a thing achieved. He does not enter — he is brought in. And 打扮 ("get-up," how someone is turned out) promises a description of clothing, which is exactly what this chapter is about.
On his head, a square Vairocana cap, its jewelled finial of cat's-eye stone ablaze with light;
毘盧 (pí lú) is short for Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha, and the 毘盧帽 is the crown an abbot wears when he presides at ritual — the mitre of the establishment. 貓睛石 is chrysoberyl, cat's-eye. This description begins at the head, exactly as the young monks' portrait did; but where theirs opened on a plain pinned cap, his opens on a gem.
on his body, a brocade-and-velvet vestment, its gold border of kingfisher plumes glittering bright.
褊衫 (biǎn shān) is the sleeved upper garment of a monk. 翡翠毛 is kingfisher feather-work, a court luxury made by gluing the iridescent barbs of the bird onto metal — ruinously expensive, and about as far from renunciation as textiles get. Set it beside the 無垢衣, the "robe without stain," of the monks at the gate.
A pair of monk's shoes clustered with the Eight Treasures; a single staff inlaid with cloud and star.
攢 is read cuán, "to gather, to cluster" — gems massed thickly on a shoe. The 八寶 are the Eight Auspicious Emblems of Buddhism, the wheel, the conch, the parasol and the rest, here worn underfoot. Even the staff he leans on is inlaid.
His face all creased with wrinkles, for all the world the Old Mother of Mount Li;
驪山老母, the Old Mother of Mount Li, is a Daoist goddess of unmeasurable age. To liken a Buddhist patriarch to her is a small and characteristic impertinence: the description praises with one hand and mocks with the other.
his pair of clouded eyes, yet like the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea.
東海龍君 is the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, from whom Wukong took the iron cudgel back in chapter three. The comparison flatters and forebodes at once — aged, bulge-eyed, and shortly to be robbed himself.
His mouth will not latch against the wind, for his teeth are fallen; his waist is humped and his back bent, for his sinews have drawn in.
口不關風, "the mouth will not latch against the wind," is a homely idiom for a man with no teeth left to close it. 為 is wèi, "because of"; 筋攣 (jīn luán) is the drawing-in of the tendons that bends an old back. The description has travelled from a jewelled crown to a ruined body in six lines, and the whole man lies in that descent.
The third portrait in as many passages, and the first that is not flattering. Wú Chéng'ēn builds it as a descent. A Vairocana crown with a cat's-eye finial; a vestment bordered in kingfisher feather; shoes heaped with the Eight Treasures; an inlaid staff — and then, abruptly, a mouth that will not close and a back that will not straighten. Every ornament in the upper half is a thing acquired. Every fact in the lower half is a thing that cannot be. The old man has spent two hundred and seventy years buying what age takes away for nothing.
The two comparisons at the turn are worth pausing on. He is like 驪山老母, a Daoist immortal, and like 東海龍君, a dragon king — neither of them Buddhist, and both of them figures of hoarded power. The Dragon King in particular is a joke aimed straight at the reader's memory: Wukong walked into his treasury too, and walked out with the best thing in it. The description tells us how this chapter ends before its plot has begun, and it does so in the language of admiring praise.