The three of them each enjoyed a fruit.

各各受用, gè gè shòu yòng, each partook — a slightly formal phrase, for one second of decorum before what follows.

But Bajie, big of gullet and big of mouth, and already, from having heard the boys eating earlier, feeling the gluttony-worm astir, now that the fruit was before him took it up, opened wide, and with a gulp swallowed it whole down his throat.

The chapter's comic peak, in one sentence of accumulating clauses. Big of gullet, big of mouth, already stirred up by having heard the boys eating through the wall, so that when the fruit is finally in his hand he opens wide and swallows it whole. 饞蟲拱動, "the gluttony-worm stirring," is vernacular for a craving one cannot sit still under — Chinese medical folklore located appetite in an actual worm in the belly. 轂轆, gū lù, the gulping sound; 囫圇, hú lún, whole and unchewed. 便覺 takes 覺 as jué, "to feel," not the jiào of sleep.

Then, rolling his eyes white and playing dumb, he asked Pilgrim and Sha Monk: "What is it you two are eating?"

白著眼, rolling the eyes white — the durative 著, zhe. 胡賴, hú lài, to brazen it out, to deny what is obvious. He has swallowed a fruit worth forty-seven thousand years so fast that he is now asking what it tasted like.

Sha Monk said, "Ginseng-fruit."

Sha Monk answers straight, as always.

Bajie said, "What does it taste like?"

And there is the real question.

Pilgrim said, "Wujing, pay him no mind.

Pilgrim declines to play along.

— you went and ate yours first, and now who are you asking?"

The line is set off by a dash in the original — a shift of address mid-speech, from Sha Monk to Bājiè.

Bajie said, "Brother, I ate mine in too much haste — not like you two, chewing fine and swallowing slow, tasting out the flavour.

細嚼細嚥, xì jiáo xì yàn, to chew fine and swallow slow — a variant of the everyday 細嚼慢嚥, and 嚼 takes the colloquial jiáo of ordinary chewing, not the jué of the literary compound 咀嚼.

I don't even know if it had a stone or not — I just gulped it down.

The admission that makes the joke: he does not know whether it had a stone. He has eaten the rarest thing in the world and can report nothing about it whatever.

Brother — do a kindness, and do it to the end!

為人為徹, wéi rén wéi chè — "do a kindness, do it through to the end," roughly the force of "in for a penny, in for a pound," deployed as a request for a second helping. Both 為 are the verb wéi, "to do, to act."

You've set my gluttony-worm going; go get another, and old Pig will eat it slow."

調動 takes 調 as diào, "to stir up, set in motion" — the same reading as 調開 earlier, and not the tiáo of "to adjust." 老豬, "old Pig," Bājiè's self-name, formed exactly like Pilgrim's 老孫.

Pilgrim said, "Brother, you have no sense of enough.

知止足, zhī zhǐ zú, to know when enough is enough — and the phrase is loaded, since 知足 is a Daoist virtue straight out of the 道德經. Pilgrim is scolding him in scripture.

This thing is not like rice or noodles, where you run into your fill.

撞著儘飽 — 著 is zháo here, meaning "run into, come upon," against the durative zhe of 白著眼 nine lines earlier. 儘飽, jǐn bǎo, to one's fill.

A thing like this, thirty fruits in ten thousand years — that we eat even one is a great karmic bond, no trifling matter.

The argument from scarcity: thirty in ten thousand years, and we have had one apiece, which is 大有緣法, a great stroke of karmic fortune. 不等小可, no trifling matter. 只結得 takes 結 as jiē, the bear-fruit reading, with the light de.

Enough, enough — that will do."

罷罷罷, three times — the vernacular for closing a subject. Enough.

He rose, and through the window-hole tossed the golden striker back into the Daoist quarters, then paid Bajie no further heed.

And he disposes of the evidence, or thinks he does: the striker goes back through the window-hole into the boys' room. 瞞窗眼兒, mán chuāng yǎn er, through the window-hole unseen. It lands on the floor, where they will find it. This is the loose end that hangs the whole party.