Now it is told that Sanzang, watching for the Pilgrim and finding him slow to return, grew heavy with doubt:

話說 is the storyteller picking the thread back up after the chapter break — roughly, now the tale goes. In 心甚疑惑 the 甚 is shèn, the plain intensifier, very; not the shén of 甚麼, what. Sanzang's first act in the chapter is to suspect his own disciple.

he could not tell whether the Bodhisattva had refused to come, or whether the Pilgrim had found a pretext and run off.

Two 不知 clauses in a row do not double the negative; they lay out alternatives — he could not tell whether one thing or the other. And the novel puts the wrong guess second, where it lands hardest: that Wukong has simply bolted. That fear runs under the whole first third of the pilgrimage, and it surfaces again in this very chapter, when the monk is left sitting in a stranger's hall while his disciple goes off alone.

In the very midst of these wild surmises he saw, high in the air, a bright shimmer of coloured mist,

胡猜亂想 — wild guessing and disordered imagining — is a set four-character phrase of the vernacular novels, and it is still exactly what Chinese reaches for when somebody's mind is running away with them. 彩霧燦燦 doubles its last character, and the doubling is what supplies the glitter. Both 中 in this line are zhōng.

and the Pilgrim dropped suddenly before the steps and knelt, saying, "Master, the cassock is come back."

墜 is a fall, not a landing. The Pilgrim does not alight in front of the steps; he drops in front of them. That he then kneels is a courtesy he pays about once a chapter.

Sanzang was overjoyed. Nor was there one among the monks who did not rejoice, crying, "Good! Good! Only today are our lives made whole again."

得全: this 得 is the full-weight dé, to get, and not the unstressed de that merely links a verb to its result. The monks' lives are had back whole, not just made whole. 方才 is only just now — and the fire of chapter sixteen has been smouldering under their gratitude for two chapters.

Sanzang received the cassock and said, "Wukong, when you set out this morning you promised to be back by the noon meal. How is it that you return only now, with the sun already west?"

飯罷晌午 means after the meal, at midday: the appointment Wukong made and missed. 日西方回 is compressed to the bone — sun in the west, and only then to come back. Sanzang is counting hours, which is as near a reproach as he lets himself come.

The Pilgrim laid out for him, from beginning to end, the whole business of inviting the Bodhisattva, of the transformations wrought, and of the monster subdued.

備陳, to set out in full, is the narrator's standard way of not setting anything out at all: the reader has just finished chapter seventeen and does not need it again. 降 is xiáng, to subdue, as before. In 一遍 the 一 shifts to yí before the falling tone of 遍 — the regular tone change that 一 makes, applied here by rule.

When Sanzang had heard him out he set up an incense table, made his obeisance toward the south, and then said,

He bows southward because that is where Potalaka lies: Guanyin's island in the southern sea, 落伽山. 朝 is cháo, to face or turn toward, not zhāo, morning. The rite is addressed to the Bodhisattva, not to the Buddha.

"Disciple, since the Buddha's robe is ours again, make haste to gather up the bundles, and let us be gone."

徒弟啊, calling out straight to his disciple, and the closing 也, are both speech markers; you can hear the register shift from narration to a man talking. 佛衣, Buddha-robe, is the cassock under its grandest name — the same garment a monastery burned down for. 佛 is read fó throughout this site.