叩頭哀告 Wukong Pleads on His Knees
行者道：「師父，我回去便也罷了，只是不曾報得你的恩哩。」唐僧道：「我與你有甚恩？」那大聖聞言，連忙跪下叩頭道：「老孫因大鬧天宮，致下了傷身之難，被我佛壓在兩界山。幸觀音菩薩與我受了戒行，幸師父救脫吾身。若不與你同上西天，顯得我知恩不報非君子，萬古千秋作罵名。」行者道：「师父，我回去便也罢了，只是不曾报得你的恩哩。」唐僧道：「我与你有甚恩？」那大圣闻言，连忙跪下叩头道：「老孙因大闹天宫，致下了伤身之难，被我佛压在两界山。幸观音菩萨与我受了戒行，幸师父救脱吾身。若不与你同上西天，显得我知恩不报非君子，万古千秋作骂名。」
逐句解 Line by line
Said Pilgrim, "Master, it would be no great matter for me to go back — only that I have never yet repaid your kindness."
The register changes here, and it changes completely. He stops arguing about whether he is right. What he says instead is that he has never repaid what he owes. 便也罷了 is "that would be all right in itself" — going is not the problem. (報得 takes the toneless de.)
The Tang Monk said, "What kindness have I ever done you?"
The coldest line the elder speaks in the chapter. What kindness have I ever done you? He is asking it of a man he pulled out from under a mountain. (甚 is shén.)
At these words the Great Sage fell at once to his knees and knocked his head on the ground: "Because I made great havoc in the Palace of Heaven, I brought upon myself the calamity of a maimed body, and was pinned by my Buddha beneath the Mountain of Two Frontiers.
And the Great Sage kneels. Consider what is on the floor here. This is the creature who ate the peaches of immortality, wrecked the Jade Emperor's banquet and fought the armies of heaven to a standstill — 大鬧天宮, the great havoc in Heaven — and was pinned under a mountain five hundred years for it. He is now on his knees, knocking his forehead on the ground, in front of a monk who is wrong about everything. The 難 of 傷身之難 is nàn, "calamity, ordeal", not nán, "difficult" — the same nàn that counts the eighty-one tribulations of the road west. (那 points: nà.)
"By good fortune the Bodhisattva Guanyin conferred on me the discipline of the precepts, and by good fortune, Master, you delivered my very self.
Two debts, named precisely. Guanyin gave him the precepts — 戒行, the vows together with the discipline of keeping them, 行 read xíng, "conduct". Tripitaka got him out from under the rock. It is the second one he is kneeling on. (觀 is guān.)
"If I did not go with you all the way to the Western Heaven, it would show me one who knows a kindness and does not repay it — no true gentleman — and for ten thousand ages, a thousand autumns, my name would be a byword for reproach."
Here is the sentence that explains why he stays. 知恩不報非君子 — to know a kindness and not repay it is to be no gentleman. Note the vocabulary: 君子, the Confucian gentleman, and not a Buddhist term in sight. A monkey demon who fought heaven is holding himself to the standard of a scholar-official, and the thing he dreads is 罵名, a name that gets cursed for ten thousand ages. The novel does this constantly — a Buddhist frame with a Confucian engine inside it. (顯得 takes the toneless de; the 子 of 君子 is zǐ.)
This plea is the moral centre of the chapter, and it works a remarkable reversal: the Great Sage who once shook Heaven kneels and knocks his head on the ground before a mortal monk. What moves him is not fear of the fillet but a debt — to Guanyin, who gave him the precepts, and to Tripitaka, who freed him from under the Mountain of Two Frontiers. The whole rebellion has been converted into service.
Notice that he frames his loyalty in Confucian rather than Buddhist terms: to know a kindness and not repay it is to be no gentleman. What binds him to the road is the 君子 ethic of requited kindness and the dread of a name that gets cursed down the ages. The novel habitually fuses its Buddhist frame with this Confucian moral core, and nowhere more nakedly than here.
Dramatic irony sharpens the pathos. Wukong abases himself to keep a bond his deceived master is bent on cutting, so that his gratitude is most eloquent at the moment it is least wanted. That the plea works — the elder relents in the next passage — is a reprieve and nothing more. The same rupture recurs twice before the chapter ends, and the third time it holds.