塵埃驚悔 Despair Among the Attendants
他兩個倒在塵埃，語言顛倒，只叫：「怎的好？怎的好？害了我五莊觀裡的丹頭，斷絕我仙家的苗裔，師父來家，我兩個怎的回話？」明月道：「師兄莫嚷，我們且整了衣冠，莫要驚張了這幾個和尚。這個沒有別人，定是那個毛臉雷公嘴的那廝，他來出神弄法，壞了我們的寶貝。他两个倒在尘埃，语言颠倒，只叫：「怎的好？怎的好？害了我五庄观里的丹头，断绝我仙家的苗裔，师父来家，我两个怎的回话？」明月道：「师兄莫嚷，我们且整了衣冠，莫要惊张了这几个和尚。这个没有别人，定是那个毛脸雷公嘴的那厮，他来出神弄法，坏了我们的宝贝。
逐句解 Line by line
The two of them lay sprawled in the dust, their words all in a tangle, crying only, "What are we to do?
倒 twice over, both dǎo: 倒在塵埃 is falling flat in the dust, and 語言顛倒, yǔ yán diān dǎo, is speech turned upside down, words coming out in the wrong order. Neither is the dào of "reverse" that Bajie used earlier.
"What are we to do?
怎的好 — "what do we do?" — twice. The repetition is the panic.
"He has ruined the elixir-head of our Five-Villages Abbey, cut off the very lineage of our immortal house! When the master comes home, how are we two to answer him?"
The boys reach for the grandest words they have. 丹頭, dān tóu, is the "elixir-head," the seed-stock an alchemical treasure comes from; 苗裔, miáo yì, is "shoots and offspring," the word for a bloodline, and it does double duty here because the tree really does have shoots. Put together, a monkey's sulk has just ended a dynasty. 觀 is again guàn, the abbey.
Bright Moon said, "Elder brother, do not cry out. Let us first set our caps and gowns to rights, and take care not to alarm these several monks.
Bright Moon is the cooler head, and his first instinct is to straighten his clothes — composure as a tactic. 整了衣冠, zhěng le yī guān, "set cap and gown to rights," takes 冠 as the noun guān, "cap," not the verb guàn, "to crown." 莫嚷, mò rǎng, is "stop shouting"; 驚張, jīng zhāng, is to spook someone.
"This is the work of no one else—it is surely that hairy-faced, thunder-god-mouthed fellow. He came and worked a spirit-magic and destroyed our treasure.
毛臉雷公嘴, máo liǎn léi gōng zuǐ — "hairy face, thunder-god mouth" — is the novel's running description of Wukong, and half the cast uses it. 雷公, Léigōng, the thunder god, is pictured with a bird's beak and a wizened simian face, so the phrase is an insult and an accurate sketch at once. 那廝, nà sī, is "that fellow" said with a curl of the lip. 出神弄法, chū shén nòng fǎ, "send out a spirit and work magic," is exactly what happened — which is the point of the passage: the boy guesses right on the first try.
With the tree down the chapter hands its second movement to the two attendants, and their terror is played for comedy: sprawled in the dust, talking in circles, repeating the same three words. But the words they choose are not small ones. The tree is the abbey's 丹頭, its elixir-head, and its 苗裔, its bloodline. In the house's own vocabulary, a fit of pique has severed something sacred.
The line that really frightens them is the last one: 師父來家，我兩個怎的回話 — when the master comes home, what do the two of us say? Their panic is less about the tree than about the interview to come, which is a recognisably human way to be afraid.
Bright Moon then does the two useful things anyone does in a crisis: he stops the shouting and he names the culprit. His identification — the hairy-faced, thunder-god-mouthed fellow who "sent out a spirit and worked magic" — is completely correct, arrived at by pure deduction, and it will be the basis of everything the abbey does next.