The brothers led in the horse and carried in the luggage, went straight through to the inner rooms, tethered the horse and set down the pole, and made their bows to the old squire and sat down with him.

Both 擔 read dàn. 莊老 is the old squire of the farmstead: a title rather than a name, and he will never be given one — which is convenient, since he does not have one.

A house-servant brought tea. When the tea was done, several bowls of sesame rice were set out; and when the meal was over, he ordered bedding laid for them to sleep.

蒼頭, "grey-head," is a household servant. And 胡麻飯 is not just supper: sesame rice is what the immortal maidens of Mount Tiantai set before Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao when the two of them wandered into the other world and stayed half a year. The dish has a provenance, and it is a provenance about mortals being fed by beings who are not mortal. 設鋪 takes 鋪 as the noun pù, bedding.

Said the Pilgrim, "Not sleeping would do well enough. But may I ask, good sir, whether in these parts there is anyone who sells eye-medicine?" Said the old man, "Which of the reverend elders suffers in the eyes?"

不睡還可: 還 is hái. In 是那位長老害眼 the 那 is the questioning nǎ, "which." Notice the old man asks the doctor's question before anyone has told him there is a patient.

Said the Pilgrim, "I will not deceive you, sir. We who have left the household life are never ill, and have never in our lives known what sore eyes are."

不曉得害眼 takes 得 as de. The Pilgrim opens with a boast dressed up as candour — we holy men are never ill — and the old man is about to catch him in it.

Said the old man, "If you have no sore eyes, why do you ask for medicine?"

Eleven characters, and the trap shuts. The old man's logic is unanswerable, and the result is that the Pilgrim gets caught telling untruths in a house that is itself one enormous untruth.

Said the Pilgrim, "Today at the mouth of the Yellow Wind Cave, as we were rescuing our master, that fiend blew a mouthful of wind at us unlooked-for,

將 is jiāng. 不期 means "unlooked-for" — the Pilgrim conceding, in one word, that he was taken by surprise.

and it left the balls of my eyes aching sourly, and now they swim with tears; and that is why I want eye-medicine."

眼淚汪汪, the eyes brimming over. He has now volunteered every detail he began by insisting there was no need to mention.

Said the old man, "Mercy, mercy! You are a reverend elder of tender years — why do you tell me lies?

善哉，善哉 renders the Sanskrit sādhu, an approving Buddhist exclamation — and the old man uses it to call a monk a liar, which is a small masterpiece of tone. 小小的年紀, "such tender years": the Pilgrim spent five hundred of them pinned under a mountain before this journey even started.

That Great King of Yellow Wind — his wind is the most terrible of all. It is no common wind: not the wind of spring or autumn, not the wind of the pines and bamboos, nor any wind of east or west or south or north…"

All three 那 are the pointing nà, and 比不得 takes the "able to" dé. The 世德堂本 prints an ellipsis before the closing quotation mark, ……」 — the old man is being cut off in mid-sentence, and by whom is clear from the next line.

"It must be the wind of the brain," said Bajie, "or the sheep's-ear wind, or the great leprous wind, or the head-wind that takes one side or the whole of it?"

Bajie interrupts with four disease names — 夾腦風, 羊耳風, 大麻風, 偏正頭風 — and every one of them is a real term from Ming medicine, where 風 means a morbid humour rather than weather. It is the ancestor of the same usage in modern 中風, a stroke. The last is a standing compound: 偏 is one-sided and 正 is central, so 偏正頭風 covers the chronic headache whether it takes half the head or all of it — the medical books pair it the same way, 偏正頭痛. Bajie has heard the word and reached for the only sense of it he happens to know.

"No," said the elder, "none of these. It is called the Wind of the Three Samādhis." Said the Pilgrim, "How can that be seen?"

The name lands, and it is the chapter's central irony. 三昧 is samādhi, the deep absorption of a practitioner in meditation — and it is being used as the brand name of a demon's breath. What makes it worse is that the man supplying the name is himself a spirit in disguise. 怎見得 takes 得 as de.

Said the old man, "That wind can blow heaven and earth into darkness, and set the ghosts and spirits grieving; it cracks the stone and brings the cliff down; and a man's life is finished at a breath of it.

Set the topic 那風 aside and what is left is four clauses of five characters each — 能吹天地暗，善刮鬼神愁，裂石崩崖惡，吹人命即休 — with 愁 and 休 rhyming at the ends of the second and fourth. It is a quatrain in everything except announcement. Because no verse tag introduces it, this edition keeps it as prose, following the rule taken at chapter 18 and confirmed at chapter 20. The 維基文庫 text of the 世德堂本 agrees: it sets every genuine poem in this chapter on its own indented lines, and runs these four clauses straight on inside the paragraph.

Should you meet with that wind of his, and it blow upon you — could you hope to be alive? Unless you were an immortal, there would be no coming off unhurt."

遇著 takes 著 as zháo, the reading for something that lands on you: the wind is met, not merely waited for. 還想得活哩 has 得 in the "able to" sense and 哩 as the vernacular tail. That closing exemption for immortals is the loophole the Pilgrim is about to climb through.