村舍晚景 The Hamlet at Dusk
師徒們行了五七日荒路，忽一日天色將晚，遠遠的望見一村人家。三藏道：「悟空，你看那壁廂有座山莊相近，我們去告宿一宵，明日再行何如？」行者道：「且等老孫去看看吉凶，再作區處。」那師父挽住絲韁，這行者定睛觀看，真個是：师徒们行了五七日荒路，忽一日天色将晚，远远的望见一村人家。三藏道：「悟空，你看那壁厢有座山庄相近，我们去告宿一宵，明日再行何如？」行者道：「且等老孙去看看吉凶，再作区处。」那师父挽住丝缰，这行者定睛观看，真个是：
逐句解 Line by line
Master and disciple travelled some five or seven days of wild road, when one day, as the sky was drawing toward dusk, they saw far off a hamlet of a few households.
五七日 is idiomatic vagueness — "five days or seven" — not an arithmetic product. 將晚: 將 is again the adverbial jiāng. 一日 takes the mechanical sandhi yí; 一村, yì.
Sanzang said, "Wukong, look — there is a mountain farmstead close by on that side. Let us go and beg a night's lodging, and take the road again tomorrow. What do you say?"
壁廂, "on that side," is a Yuan–Ming colloquialism, literally "wall-quarter." 相近: 相 is xiāng, the reciprocal adverb. 告宿 — to beg a lodging — is the pilgrim's standard petition, and 一宵 takes yì before the first-tone 宵.
The Pilgrim said, "Wait till old Sun has gone to look whether it be lucky or ill, and we will settle the matter then."
區處 is a compound verb, "to dispose, to settle," and 處 is therefore chǔ, not the nominal chù; pypinyin defaults wrongly. The Pilgrim proposes reconnaissance where his master proposes hospitality — the division of labour of the whole book in one exchange.
The Master reined in the silken bridle; the Pilgrim fixed his gaze and looked. It was in truth like this:
The paired demonstratives 那師父 / 這行者 are a storyteller's deixis, pointing at two figures on an imagined stage. 定睛觀看 is the fixed formula that always precedes a set-piece.
Bamboo hedges dense on dense; thatched roofs tier on tier.
A 賦 in six units, the first two of which are four-graph parallel pairs. 重重 is chóng chóng, "layer upon layer," not zhòng.
Wild trees, sky-piercing, greet the gate; a winding stream and its bridge cast their shadow across the door.
參天, "reaching to the sky." 曲水: 曲 is qū, "winding," not qǔ, "a tune"; pypinyin defaults wrongly. 映戶 — the bridge is mirrored, or casts its reflection, at the doorway.
By the road the willows are green, and green upon green; within the garden the flowers are open, and fragrance upon fragrance.
道傍: 傍 writes 旁 and takes páng by the loan-graph rule, not the verbal bàng. The reduplicatives 依依 and 馥馥 answer each other across the caesura.
At this hour the last light is sinking westward, and everywhere in the hill-woods the birds are clamouring;
This unit and the next are joined in the original by ；, and by house convention are kept as two verse units. 夕照沉西 — the "evening reflection" is the light, not the sun itself.
the evening smoke climbs from the cooking-fires, and along every lane the cattle and sheep are turning home.
爨 (cuàn) is the cooking-hearth; 晚煙出爨 is the smoke of the supper fires. 條條道徑: lane after lane, the reduplication again structural.
See too the fowls and swine, fed full, drowsing at the corner of the house, and the tipsy old neighbour coming along in song.
雞豚, fowl and pig, is the classic metonymy for a farmer's modest plenty, reaching back to 孟子. 醉酣鄰叟唱歌來 closes the rhapsody on a note of drunken contentment — the last untroubled image before Zhu Ganglie is named.
The rhapsody is a georgic, and its motifs are deliberately unmarvellous: hedges, thatch, a bridge, willows, smoke, livestock, a drunk old man. Nothing in it is supernatural, and nothing in it is Buddhist. Gao Village is the first purely secular settlement the pilgrims have entered, and the novel dresses it in the imagery of the pastoral tradition — 雞豚 from the 孟子, 鄰叟 from Tao Qian — precisely so that the monster living in its back court shall seem the more incongruous.
Note also who looks. Sanzang sees a farmstead and thinks of a bed; the Pilgrim asks first whether the omen is 吉 or 凶 and then stares until the scene resolves. The 賦 that follows is his vision, not his master's, and it finds nothing amiss. Sun Wukong's eye for danger is, at this early stage, no better than anyone else's — it is his eye for imposture, in the second half of the chapter, that the narrator means to display.