找路奔西 Westward Again
行者遂伏侍唐僧上馬，八戒挑著行囊，沙僧跟隨左右，師徒們找大路，一直奔西。這的是：行者遂伏侍唐僧上马，八戒挑着行囊，沙僧跟随左右，师徒们找大路，一直奔西。这的是：
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim then waited upon the Tang Monk to mount, Eight Rules shouldered the luggage, Sha Monk followed to left and right, and master and disciples found the main road and made straight for the west.
行者 and 行囊 both keep 行 as xíng; 挑著 keeps 著 as zhe, with 挑 as tiāo, to carry on a shoulder-pole — the other reading of the character that appeared earlier as tiǎo in 挑戰, to provoke a fight. The marching order re-forms and the road goes on.
This is it:
這的是 and a colon: the cue for the couplet that closes the chapter's story and sums up the whole stretch of river.
The holy monk, by imperial charge, goes to worship Amitābha; / the waters far, the mountains distant, his calamities are many.
拜彌陀, to worship Amitābha. 災難 is calamity — and 難 is one of this chapter's recurring two-reading characters, meaning "hard to" in 難知 and 難脫 but naming a disaster in 身有難 and 僧難. The first line names the mission; the second names its price.
His will and heart are true, and he fears not death; / the white turtle bore him in ferry across the River of Heaven.
白黿 keeps 黿 as yuán; 馱渡, to carry across on the back. The closing couplet fixes the picture the reader is meant to keep — the pilgrim ferried over the sky-river on a turtle's shell.
The closing verse is a two-line summing-up, the kind the novel places at the end of an episode to fix its shape in the memory. The first line restates the mission in its most formal terms — 聖僧奉旨拜彌陀, the holy monk sent by imperial command to worship the Buddha — and the second names what it costs: 水遠山遙災難多, far waters, distant mountains, and calamities without number. That is the frame the whole pilgrimage hangs in, a commission from an emperor and a road measured out in disasters survived.
The second couplet turns from the mission to the man, and then to the emblem. 意志心誠不懼死, his will true and unafraid of death, is Tripitaka's one durable virtue — the thing that got him across a river which had already nearly drowned him. And 白黿馱渡過天河, the white turtle carrying him over the River of Heaven, is the image the chapter chooses to leave behind.
Three chapters of the Tongtian resolve into that single picture. Not the demon, not the battles, not even the fish in the basket: a pilgrim carried dry across the water on the back of a living creature he had very nearly clubbed to death.