願退金箍 He Would Give Back the Band
師父果若不要我,把那個鬆箍兒咒念一念,退下這個箍子,交付與你,套在別人頭上,我就快活相應了,也是跟你一場。莫不成這些人意兒也沒有了?」师父果若不要我,把那个松箍儿咒念一念,退下这个箍子,交付与你,套在别人头上,我就快活相应了,也是跟你一场。莫不成这些人意儿也没有了?」
逐句解 Line by line
"If you truly will not have me, Master, then recite the Band-Loosening Spell just once and take this band off, hand it back to you to clap on somebody else's head — and I'll go off content; it will still have been a spell of service to you.
This is the most reasonable thing anybody says in the chapter, and it is unbearable. If you truly will not have me, then say the spell that takes the band off, and I will hand it back to you — put it on somebody else. He has stopped arguing. He is negotiating an exit that will not cripple him. (那 points, nà; the 兒 and 子 tags are the small toneless kind; 相應 takes xiāng and yìng.)
"Surely these people haven't so little human feeling as that?"
人意 is human feeling — ordinary decency, the consideration one person owes another. Surely, he says, there is at least that much left. The Great Sage, who once needed nobody at all, is asking the party throwing him out to be decent about it. (The 兒 is the small toneless tag.)
Wukong's request is the plea's devastating turn. Resigned, if he must be, to expulsion, he asks only that the master say a Band-Loosening Spell and free him of the fillet, so that his going — however unjust — leaves him whole. The reasonableness is the pathos. He does not rage against the injustice; he tries to negotiate a departure that will do him no permanent harm.
The appeal to 人意, plain human feeling — surely his companions are not so heartless as to refuse him this — measures how far the bond has been strained. The Great Sage, who needed nobody, is asking for common decency from the very party casting him out. It is a moment of real vulnerability, and it is about to be met not with cruelty but with something worse: the news that what he asks for does not exist.
The passage sets up the chapter's quietest tragedy. Wukong assumes the band can come off as easily as it went on. The next passage discloses that there is no loosening-spell at all, and that the fillet, and with it his bondage to the road, is permanent. His entirely reasonable request turns out to have no possible answer.