Sanzang said, "Disciple, let your anger cool.

The master's first move is always to cool the room. 息怒 is xī nù, "rest your anger."

"We are men who have left the household life. Utter no lying words, and eat no food that shames the conscience.

Sanzang answers a shouting match with the rulebook. 出家人, chū jiā rén, is one who has "left the household" — the ordinary term for a monk or nun. 誑語, kuáng yǔ, is false speech, one of the gravest breaches of the monastic precepts. 昧心 is mèi xīn, "to darken the heart": food eaten 昧心 is food your conscience knows you should not be eating.

"If you truly ate them, then make him a proper apology and have done—why keep up this stubborn denial?"

陪他個禮, péi tā gè lǐ, is to make him a formal apology; the verb 陪…禮, péi lǐ, is also written 賠禮. 抵賴, dǐ lài, is to deny a fault flat out — still the word today for someone caught red-handed and brazening it out.

The Pilgrim, seeing that his master spoke with reason, then told the truth: "Master, the fault is not mine.

Reason works on Wukong where scolding never does. 說得有理, shuō de yǒu lǐ, is "spoke sense," with the toneless linking 得, de. 不干我事, bù gān wǒ shì, is "none of my business," and it is still exactly how you say that.

"It was Bajie who, through the wall, heard those two Daoist lads eating some ginseng fruit or other. He took a fancy to try one for its novelty and had me, old Sun, go knock down three; we three brothers ate one apiece.

The confession is exact: he names the instigator, the count, and who ate what. 隔壁, gé bì, is "through the wall" — Bajie was eavesdropping from next door. 著 here is zhuó, the verb "to have someone do something," and this character is the chapter's great chameleon: zhe when it marks an action still going on, zháo when it marks one that has hit its target, zhuó when it sends somebody off on an errand, as here. 嘗新, cháng xīn, is trying something for the novelty of it.

"Now that they are eaten and gone, what would you have us do about it?"

吃也吃了 shrugs the whole thing off: eaten is eaten. 待要, dài yào, is not "want to" here but a rhetorical "so what would you have me do about it?"

Bright Moon said, "He stole four of mine, and still this monk says he is no thief!"

Bright Moon corrects the count upward — four, not three. 還 is the adverb hái, "still, even so," not the huán of 還丹, the "reverted elixir" that will shortly give the tree its grandest name. The 哩 at the end is li, a particle that plants a sentence firmly, something like "and there he stands saying…"

Bajie said, "Amitābha!

阿彌陀佛 is Ēmítuó Fó, the Buddha Amitābha, whose name gets used the way an English speaker says "Lord have mercy" — piety as punctuation. In the mouth of the pig who ate the missing fourth fruit, it is the best-timed prayer in the book.

"Since four were stolen, how is it that only three were brought out to share—did you not palm off one for yourself beforehand?"

Here is the joke. Bajie ate the fourth fruit himself, and now he uses the boys' own count to accuse Wukong of holding one back. 分 is the verb fēn, "to share out," not the noun fèn, "a portion, one's lot." 偏手, piān shǒu, is skimming a bit off the top before the split — the cut a dishonest middleman takes.

So the blockhead turned the tables and blustered on.

獃子, dāi zi, "blockhead," is the narrator's fixed label for Bajie, used the way a sitcom keeps one running nickname per character. 倒轉 is dào zhuǎn, "to flip it round," the guilty man turning prosecutor; note that 倒 is dào for "reverse" but dǎo in 推倒, "to topple," which is what Wukong is about to do to the tree. 胡嚷, hú rǎng, is blustering noise.