尋師擒怪 To Seek the Master and Take the Fiend
兄弟三人飽餐一頓，將馬匹、行囊交與陳家看守。各整兵器，徑赴河邊尋師擒怪。正是：兄弟三人饱餐一顿，将马匹、行囊交与陈家看守。各整兵器，径赴河边寻师擒怪。正是：
逐句解 Line by line
The three brothers ate their fill, and handed over the horses and the baggage to the Chen household to keep.
將 is jiāng; 行囊: 行 is xíng. 看守: 看 is kān, "to watch over, to mind" — the tending sense, not the kàn of 看見 used everywhere else in this chapter. 一頓 lifts 一 to yí before a falling tone.
Each put his weapons in order, and they went straight down to the riverside to seek their master and take the fiend.
Twelve characters setting the agenda of Chapter Forty-Nine.
It is just this:
The closing tag stands on its own.
Treading the layered ice in error, he has done his own nature harm; / the Great Elixir slipped and leaked away — how shall it be made whole?
層冰 is the phrase from the chapter title, 僧思拜佛履層冰. The second line reads the whole episode as inner alchemy: 大丹, the Great Elixir, is the refined essence a practitioner spends a lifetime building; 脫漏 is its leaking away; and 本性, the original nature, stands for Tripitaka himself.
The chapter ends on a couplet that reinterprets everything before it in the vocabulary of inner alchemy. 誤踏層冰傷本性 — treading the layered ice in error has injured the original nature; 大丹脫漏怎周全 — the Great Elixir has leaked away, and how is it to be made whole? Read that way, the Tang Monk is not a man captured by a fish but the refined essence itself, lost through one lapse of discipline.
The couplet also names the fault exactly, and its word for it is 誤, error. Not weakness, not sin, not bad luck: a mistake, made for good reasons, on the best information available. Sha Monk had said it some fifteen hundred characters earlier — 忙中恐有錯, in haste there is danger of a mistake — and was told his view was foolish.
The last narrative image is the three disciples eating a full meal, handing horse and baggage to their hosts, taking up their weapons and walking back down to the water. They have gone down to that river three times in this chapter: once to look at the ice, once to cross it, and now to go in after him.