The tale tells how Sun the Pilgrim sprang aloft on a single somersault, and how the monks of the Guanyin Temple, great and small alike, with the mendicants, the serving lads, and the lay attendants,

We open in mid-air. The monkey has just gone up like a firework and the narrator, instead of following him, stays down in the courtyard with the upturned faces. Three notes on the wording. 觔斗, the somersault: the first character is standing in for 筋, sinew, and takes that word's reading, jīn — a borrowed character is pronounced as the word it writes, not as itself. 斗 is properly a dry measure, a peck, pressed into service here for a tumbler; it reads dǒu, not dòu. And 諕 is an old way of writing 嚇, to frighten, so it reads xià; the 得 riding behind it is the little de that links a verb to its effect. As for the crowd: 頭陀 is Chinese for Sanskrit dhūta, the hard ascetic practices, and by extension the monks who keep them, while 道人 in a Buddhist house is not a Taoist at all but a lay servant.

bowed one and all toward Heaven, crying: "Merciful Father! So he is a holy one come down among us, who mounts the clouds and drives the mist. Small wonder the fire could work him no hurt.

They bow at empty sky, which is the joke, and their reading of what they saw is theologically exact. 朝天 — 朝 here is cháo, to face towards or wait upon, as in 朝拜, going to court. 爺爺呀 is a yelp, not a form of address: nobody's father is being called. The 呀 is the toneless cry ya. And 怪道 is the everyday equivalent of 怪不得 — no wonder, that explains it.

That old flayer of ours, who could not know a man when he saw one, plotted and contrived, and this day has undone none but himself."

The monks have found someone to blame, and it is their own dead abbot. 老剝皮, the old flayer, is the name they now pin on the covetous prior of the last chapter; 剝 takes its colloquial reading bāo, as settled in chapter 16. 使心用心 — spending the heart and employing the heart — is the idiom for scheming, and the sentence bends it straight back on the schemer.

Sanzang said, "Rise, gentlemen; there is no cause for reproach. If he finds the cassock, all matters may rest;

Sanzang's opening move looks like forgiveness. 三藏 always reads zàng in the name. 尋著 is one of those verbs where the second character reports that the thing was actually found, so 著 is zháo — attainment, not mere trying. 萬事皆休, all matters may rest, is the phrase for a debt discharged.

but should the search come to nothing, my disciple is of no gentle temper,

And here is the sting in the tail. 找尋不著 is the same verb turned negative — if he cannot find it — and 著 is still zháo. On the tone of 不: it is computed from the character's ordinary dictionary tone, 著 as zhù, fourth tone, which pulls 不 up to bú. An editor's decision about which reading is meant never disturbs that calculation. The 子 of 性子, temper, is the toneless suffix.

and what may become of your lives I cannot say. I fear not one among you would get clear."

脫 here is not to shed but to get clear, to come off alive. Sanzang has phrased a death threat as a personal regret, and the courtesy of it makes it colder than a threat would have been.

Hearing these words, the monks were seized every one with a lifted heart and a hanging gall. They called upon Heaven and vowed offerings, praying only that the cassock be recovered and their lives preserved entire. Of this no more.

提心弔膽 — the heart hoisted and the gall left hanging — is still the standard Chinese for being terrified, and 弔 is simply the older way of writing 吊, to hang. Two readings of 得 land in this one line and have to be told apart by position: 聞得, heard-and-took-it-in, has the linking de; 尋得, manage to find, has the full verb dé. The closing 不題 is the storyteller shutting a drawer: of this, no more.