As he went on, a mountain wind blew up exceeding fierce, and with a roar it toppled a dead tree, which rolled to a stop before him. Stamping and beating his breast, he cried: "Brother! What's this now? I've said all along I dare not lie — so why turn into a tree to strike me?"

Beat two. 來得甚猛, lái de shèn měng, "came on fiercely" — and note the 甚 here is shèn, "exceedingly," while the second 甚 in the same segment, in 甚麼樹, is the ordinary shén of "what." One character, two readings, twenty-odd characters apart. 刮倒 takes 倒 as dǎo; 那 is nà; 得 is de. A dead tree blows down in front of him and he beats his breast at it: why turn into a tree to hit me?

Going still further, he saw a white-necked old crow that cawed several times right over his head; and he said again: "Brother, shame on you, shame on you! I said I wouldn't make up tales, and I won't — so why keep turning into a crow? Have you come to listen?"

Beat three. 白頸老鴉, bái jǐng lǎo yā, "a white-necked old crow" — the collared crow, and in Chinese folklore about as unlucky a bird as you can meet on a road. 變著 takes 著 as zhe. He scolds it for shamelessness and protests his honesty to it, which is more than he ever did to the actual Pilgrim.

Now this time Pilgrim had not in fact followed him at all; it was the pig himself who took fright at his own shadow and guessed wildly, so that nowhere did he go but he suspected Pilgrim was at his side.

And the narrator lifts the veil. 自驚自怪, zì jīng zì guài, "frightening himself and finding himself strange" — startled by nothing but his own mind. Here 那裡 is pointing at a place, so 那 is nà. This time Pilgrim had not followed him at all. The tiger was a tiger, the tree was a tree, the crow was a crow.

Of the blockhead's alarm we say no more for now.

且不題, qiě bù tí, "and of that we shall say no more for now" — the storyteller's way of cutting to another scene, the Ming equivalent of a hard cut. The novel uses it whenever two lines of action need to be run in parallel.