痴長二百七十 Two Hundred and Seventy Years
老僧道：「也有萬里之遙了。我弟子虛度一生，山門也不曾出去，誠所謂『坐井觀天』，樗朽之輩。」三藏又問：「老院主高壽幾何？」老僧道：「痴長二百七十歲了。」行者聽見道：「這還是我萬代孫兒哩。」三藏瞅了他一眼道：「謹言，莫要不識高低，衝撞人。」那和尚便問：「老爺，你有多少年紀了？」行者道：「不敢說。」老僧道：「也有万里之遥了。我弟子虚度一生，山门也不曾出去，诚所谓『坐井观天』，樗朽之辈。」三藏又问：「老院主高寿几何？」老僧道：「痴长二百七十岁了。」行者听见道：「这还是我万代孙儿哩。」三藏瞅了他一眼道：「谨言，莫要不识高低，冲撞人。」那和尚便问：「老爷，你有多少年纪了？」行者道：「不敢说。」
逐句解 Line by line
The old monk said, "That is a remoteness of ten thousand lǐ.
之遙 is "of remoteness." He rounds Sanzang's eleven thousand lǐ down to a round ten thousand — 萬, the number that in Chinese has stopped meaning a quantity and simply means all of them.
"Your disciple has idled a whole life away and has never once gone out of the mountain gate. I am truly what men call one who sits in a well to look at the sky — a fellow of rotten ailanthus wood."
Two Daoist put-downs in a single breath, and he means neither. 坐井觀天 — "sitting in a well, looking at the sky" — is proverbial, and comes from the frog of the 《莊子》 who cannot be told about the sea because he has never seen it. It is still exactly what Chinese says about a narrow outlook. 樗 (chū) is the ailanthus, Zhuangzi's useless tree, so 樗朽之輩 is "a fellow of rotten ailanthus wood" — timber not even worth the felling.
Sanzang asked again, "What is the venerable prior's honoured age?" "I have foolishly attained two hundred and seventy years," said the old monk.
高壽幾何 ("what is your honoured age?") is the polite formula, and 痴長 ("stupidly grown old"; 長 is zhǎng) the answering modesty. Two hundred and seventy years in a Buddhist house is not sanctity but accumulation — and the number will come back, within the hour, as an inventory of robes.
The Pilgrim, hearing this, said, "Even so, he would be my descendant of the ten-thousandth generation."
還 is hái, "even so, still." Wukong is well past a thousand years old. Coming directly after 雷公是我的重孫兒 — "Lord Thunder is my great-grandson" — this is the second time in an hour he has made a stranger his junior, and the second time nobody believes him.
Sanzang shot him a glance and said, "Guard your tongue. Don't be one who cannot tell high from low, and affront a man."
瞅 (chǒu) is the sidelong look a parent gives a child in company. 不識高低, "not knowing high from low," is precisely the charge Heaven laid against Wukong when he seized the Peaches of Immortality. Sanzang is scolding him for insolence in the presence of a man whose insolence will shortly be lethal.
The monk then asked, "And how many years have you, reverend sir?" "I dare not say," said the Pilgrim.
不敢說 — "I dare not say" — answers the old monk's formulaic 不敢 of the last passage with an entirely different weight behind it. Told to hold his tongue, Wukong for once holds it; and the joke is that the true answer would have ended the conversation on the spot, and saved the monastery.
Three claims of age are made in twenty lines, and every one of them is misheard. The old monk confesses to two hundred and seventy years and calls himself a frog in a well. Wukong replies that such a man would be his descendant in the ten-thousandth generation, and is told to be quiet. Asked his own age, he says only 不敢說 — "I dare not say." Of the three, the humble self-description is the boast and the outrageous boast is the plain fact; and the one piece of truthful reticence in the passage is mistaken for good manners.
The comedy conceals a precise moral geometry. The old monk's 坐井觀天 is borrowed from Zhuangzi, where the frog in the well is not wicked but merely small: he has never seen the sea, and so cannot be told about it. That is exactly the old man's condition, and exactly why the cassock will destroy him. A robe sewn by the Bodhisattva is not a better version of the seven or eight hundred things already in his chests, and he has no faculty by which to learn the difference. Sanzang's rebuke to Wukong — 莫要不識高低, "do not fail to tell high from low" — lands on the wrong man.