The host of monkeys clapped their hands and laughed aloud: “What luck, what luck! Why be a monk any longer? Come home to us, and take us along to play a few years more.” And they cried, “Quick, set out the coconut wine, and give our Sire a homecoming feast!”

The monkeys' reaction is pure relief — good, you can stop being a monk — and they call for wine. 接風 is the feast you throw for someone who has just come off the road, still an everyday word for a welcome dinner. Literally it means meeting the wind, as though you were going out to catch the traveller's dust. 家來 takes jiā, come home, colloquial. 做甚麼和尚 takes shén: why be a monk at all?

Said the Great Sage, “Hold the wine a moment. Let me ask you — those hunters, how often do they come up onto my mountain?”

He will not drink until he has the hunters' timetable. 那 is nà, those. 一度 is one occurrence, one time round — how often does it come round?

Ma and Liu replied, “Great Sage, whatever the season, they are here day after day, forever pestering us.”

馬 and 流 are two of the four commanders the chapter calls 二元帥 and 二將軍, two marshals and two generals — the 四健將, four stout captains, of the early chapters. 逐日家 ends in a colloquial 家, jiā, that does no work beyond making the phrase sound spoken: day in, day out. 甚麼 takes shén.

“Why have they not come today?” asked the Great Sage. “They should be coming any moment,” said Ma and Liu.

看待來耶 — kàn, dài — they are expected, any minute now. The reply is casual and the timing is not: he has just been handed the one piece of information he needs.

The Great Sage gave his orders: “Little ones, all of you go out and gather up for me the loose stones on the mountain, the ones scorched brittle by fire, and pile them up. Heap them twenty or thirty to a mound, or fifty or sixty to a pile — I have a use for them.”

And here is the turn that makes the chapter. He orders the loose stone gathered into piles. 燒酥了 — burned crumbly — means the rubble left when Erlang's fire cracked the mountain during the Havoc in Heaven, six chapters back. The ruin he has just been weeping over is about to become his ammunition. 那 is nà; 搬將 takes jiāng; 堆著 ends in the unstressed zhe, twice over, marking piles that stay piled. One oddity in the edition: the first heap is written 一推, a push, where the second is 一堆堆著, a heap — encoded as it stands.

The little monkeys, all in a swarm, went scrambling to and fro and heaped up many mounds.

一窩峰 is all in a swarm, and the swarm is bees: the phrase is normally written with 蜂, the bee, but this edition writes 峰, a mountain peak. Same sound, fēng, wrong insect — and the chapter itself writes the expected form later on, so both spellings sit in the same chapter. Encoded as it stands. 那 is nà; 都 is dōu.

When the Great Sage saw it done, he ordered: “Little ones, go and hide inside the cave, and let this old Monkey work his art.”

He puts his own people indoors before he starts. 教 is jiào here, to order someone to do a thing, not jiāo, to teach it. 作法 is to work a spell. 藏躲 takes cáng; 都 is dōu.