Presently the old man led out one of the young men, who carried a wooden tray and offered three cups of clear tea. The tea drunk, he gave order for a fasting-meal.

板盤兒 takes the suffix er. The tea is 清茶, plain and unadorned, which is what a farmhouse has; the courtesy of offering it is not diminished by that, and the novel says so by mentioning it at all.

The young man brought out an old table full of holes and bare of lacquer, and carried in two benches with broken tops and crippled legs,

A table 有窟窿無漆水 — with holes and without lacquer — and benches 破頭折腳. The parallelism is exact and the poverty is real. This is the household whose rice Bajie is about to eat entire.

set them down in the courtyard, and invited the three of them to be seated in the cool. Then Sanzang asked, "What is my aged benefactor's honored surname?"

三眾, sān zhòng, the three religious. 涼處 takes 處 as chù, a place.

The old man said, "Your servant's name is Wang." "And how many worthy sons?" "Two small sons," said he, "and three little grandsons."

令嗣, "your worthy heirs," is the polite form; 小兒, "my worthless sons," the answering humble one, and its 兒 is the lexical ér. The old man is a farmer and handles the register perfectly.

Sanzang said, "My congratulations, my congratulations." And he asked further, "What is your honored age?" "I have foolishly attained sixty-one years."

痴長六十一歲: 痴長, "foolishly grown to," is the self-deprecating idiom for stating one's age, and 長 is zhǎng.

The Pilgrim said, "Good, good, good — the cycle has come round again." Sanzang asked once more, "Aged benefactor, why did you say at first that the scriptures of the West were hard to fetch?"

花甲重逢 — the sexagenary cycle met a second time. Strictly this would fall at one hundred and twenty; the Pilgrim is being polite, or arithmetically careless, and the joke works either way. 重 is chóng, "again."

The old man said, "The scriptures are not hard to fetch. It is only that the road is rough and hard going.

經非難取，只是道中艱澀難行. The old man now retracts his earlier 去不得 and reduces it to a matter of road conditions — but the sentence he chooses, "it is the way itself that is difficult," is the same double statement he made before, and the monk again hears only the road.

Thirty lǐ westward of us, or thereabouts, there stands a mountain called the Yellow Wind Ridge of Eight Hundred Lǐ,

八百里黃風嶺. The measure 里 stays untranslated, as lǐ. The mountain is named for its wind before any demon is named, and the wind will prove to be the demon.

and on that mountain are many fiends. That is what I meant by hard to fetch.

故言難取者，此也 is a small flourish of literary Chinese in a peasant's mouth, closing the explanation as a scholar would close it. 難 is nán in all four occurrences of this passage.

But if this little elder has all the arts he says he has, why then, you may pass."

小長老, "little elder," is the old man's form for the Pilgrim: courteous, and just faintly amused. 卻也去得, potential 得, dé.

The Pilgrim said, "No matter, no matter. With Old Monkey here and this junior of mine, let them be what fiends they please, they will not dare to meddle with me."

不妨，不妨, doubled as the old man doubled his own 去得，去得. 任他是甚麼妖怪 — the last boast of the chapter, and the boast the chapter exists to break.