僧眾出迎 The Monks Come Forth
長老下了馬，行者歇了擔，正欲進門，只見那門裡走出一眾僧來。你看他怎生模樣：长老下了马，行者歇了担，正欲进门，只见那门里走出一众僧来。你看他怎生模样：
逐句解 Line by line
The elder dismounted, the Pilgrim set down the load, and they were on the point of entering when out through the gate came a company of monks. See now how they were got up:
The monks come out before the travellers can get in. 長老 (zhǎng lǎo), "elder," is the standing form of address for Sanzang throughout the book. 擔 is dàn here, the load slung from a carrying-pole — the noun, not the verb dān, "to shoulder." In 模樣 the first character is mú. And 你看他怎生模樣 — "look how they were got up" — is the storyteller turning to face his audience, which always means a portrait-poem is coming.
On their heads, caps pinned at the left; on their bodies, robes without stain.
笄 (jī) is a hairpin, so a 左笄帽 is a cap pinned at the left. 無垢 (wú gòu) translates Sanskrit vimala, "undefiled" — the robe is spotless in the ritual sense and not merely the laundry one. Hold that phrase. This house will produce eight hundred robes before the evening is out.
Bronze rings hang doubled from their ears; silk sashes bind their waists about.
銅環, bronze earrings, are an ascetic's gear rather than a vanity: plain metal, worn as discipline. 腰圍 (wéi) is the girth of the waist that the sash goes round.
Straw sandals make their walking steady; wooden fish they carry in their hands.
木魚 (mù yú), the "wooden fish," is the fish-shaped block a monk taps to keep time while chanting. The reason it is a fish is that a fish never shuts its eyes, and so stands for staying awake — which is worth remembering, because this monastery is about to spend a whole night very much awake, for reasons nobody would call vigilance. 行 here is xíng, to walk.
In their mouths, recitation without ceasing; in prajñā they take refuge, all of them.
作念 is to keep a name or a formula going under the breath, the way a rosary is kept going. 般若 is prajñā, transcendent wisdom, and it must be read bō rě, never bān ruò — one of the fossil pronunciations that Buddhist Chinese has preserved since the age of translation. 皈依 (guī yī) is to take refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Teaching, the Order. The portrait ends on the most perfect monastic act there is.
The portrait-poem is a set form — eight balanced five-syllable lines running from head to foot to voice — and everything it reports is correct. Cap, robe, earrings, sash, sandals, wooden fish, unbroken recitation, refuge in wisdom: a checklist of the well-kept Buddhist, ticked straight down. Wú Chéng'ēn is at his most deadpan here. He has just spent a long description on a flawless building, and now spends a poem on flawless men, and a reader who has glanced at the chapter title reads every line of it as an indictment being drawn up.
Notice what the form is incapable of showing. The poem describes surfaces only: what is worn, what is carried, what is said out loud. Of appetite, of two hundred and seventy years of accumulation, of what a man might do at midnight for a piece of embroidered silk, it has nothing to report — because none of that shows on the outside of a monk. The chapter's whole method is here in miniature. Let the exterior speak first, at length and without a wink, and then let the interior speak for itself.