When the Pilgrim heard the words "Buddha-robe," he settled it in his mind that the treasure was his own.

He has heard two characters and made up his mind. 聞得 is again heard-and-registered, with the linking de, and 以為 takes the plain copula wéi. The verb to watch is 定 — he settled it, fixed it — which is the narrator's quiet mark against him. The Pilgrim does not deduce. He decides.

He could not master his rage. Springing out from the stone cliff, he raised the golden-hooped rod in both hands and shouted, "You pack of thieving fiends!

忍不住, could not hold it in: the 不 rises to bú before fourth-tone 住. 夥 is a pack or gang, the measure word you would use for bandits.

You have stolen my cassock, and now you would hold a Buddha-Robe Feast?

甚麼 reads shén. Notice that he throws their own coinage back at them — he has been crouched behind that rock long enough to have picked up the name of the party.

Bring it here this instant and give it back!" With a bellow of "Not a step!" he swung up the rod and brought it down full on their heads.

趁早兒 carries the toneless diminutive 兒, er. 將來 here is not the future tense but the full verb 將, jiāng, bring — bring it here — and 還 is huán, hand back, not the adverb hái. 休走, don't you move, is the standard bellow before a blow lands.

In their panic the black fellow turned to wind and fled, the Taoist mounted a cloud and was gone, and only the white-clad scholar was beaten dead by a single stroke.

慌得 takes the linking de. The three escapes are graded, and the grading is the point: the bear turns into wind, the Taoist takes a cloud, and the scholar can do neither. What cannot fly is what gets killed.

Dragging the body over to look at it, he found it was a mottled white snake-spirit.

拖將過來 — 將 is a little linking syllable, jiāng, marking which way the action goes. 白花蛇 is a mottled white snake, and there it is: the white robe and the white scales were always the same piece of information. It is simply arriving after the fact.

He hauled it up for good measure and wrenched it into five or seven lengths; then he went straight into the deep mountain to hunt for that black fellow.

捽, zuó, is to grab and wrench. 五七斷 is not a count — nobody is meant to check whether it was five or seven — it is just the idiom for into pieces. And the gratuitousness is deliberate: the snake was already dead.

Rounding a sharp peak and skirting a steep ridge, he saw, before a sheer wall of cliff, a cave-dwelling reared aloft. Behold it:

抹 here is to skirt round or brush past. 但見那 announces the chapter's second rhapsody, and by now the reader can safely predict that a fiend's cave is about to be described as paradise.

Mist and rosy cloud, faint and far; pine and cypress, dense and dark.

The rhapsody opens with two four-character phrases and then says them again at greater length — expansion by repetition, a favourite move of the 賦.

Mist and rosy cloud, faint and far, their colours crowding the gate; pine and cypress, dense and dark, their green encircling the door.

遶 is an old way of writing 繞, to encircle, and takes that word's reading, rào. 采 is the colour the mist takes on as it crowds the gateway.

The bridge is trodden on a withered raft of timber; the summit is wound about with fig-vine.

枯槎 is a dead tree laid across a stream as a bridge — and also the raft on which a man in an old legend drifted up to the Milky Way. The second sense is faintly present here.

Birds bear red stamens to the cloudy ravine; deer tread the fragrant thicket to the terrace of stone.

啣, xián, is to carry something in the beak. Birds ferrying blossom and deer stepping up to a stone terrace are the standard furniture of a paradise-cave, and the reader ought to be a little uneasy about how well this fiend has furnished his.

Before that gate the season hurries the flowers to open, and the wind conveys their scent.

那 is pointing, nà. In 時催 the season itself is chivvying the flowers along, the way a foreman chivvies a workman.

Overlooking the dyke, green willows turn with orioles; bordering the bank, young peach trees flutter with powdered butterflies.

Here is that contrast promised earlier. In 傍岸 the character 傍 is a real verb, to lie alongside, and so keeps bàng — where in 傍門外道 above it was writing 旁 and read páng. 夭桃, the young peach, comes straight out of the Shijing.

A wilderness, and scarcely to be boasted of — yet it outdoes the prospect below Penglai.

The turn is a piece of mock modesty: 曠野不堪誇 concedes that the place is only a wilderness, and the next clause snatches the concession back. 蓬萊 is Penglai, the isle of the immortals. So: a bear-fiend keeps a garden that immortals might envy.