Hearing him say it, the old man took fright in his heart. "This monk is a ghost, a ghost," he said.

心中 has zhōng, within. Saying 是鬼 twice over is the novel's standard mark of panic in speech: the doubling is the fright.

He turned away sharply and made to go back inside.

抽身 is to pull your body away out of a situation. Seven characters of pure movement, with no comment attached.

Pilgrim caught hold of him and said: "Where are you off to, patron? If you have food, hand a little over."

那裡去 is a question, so 那 reads nǎ: where to? 些兒 takes the little er ending. Wukong takes a frightened old man by the sleeve and asks him for lunch, and the novel plays the whole thing for comedy.

The old man said: "It is not convenient, not convenient. Go and try another house."

罷 ends the sentence here, so it reads ba — the soft "go on, then" — not the verb bà, to stop. 一家兒 takes the little er ending. The doubling of 不方便 marks agitation again.

Pilgrim said: "You are a patron who does not know how to manage things. You told me it was a thousand lǐ from here. If I turn to another house, would that not be another thousand?"

好不會事 is "does not know how to manage matters". Wukong turns the old man's own figure straight back on him — if this house is a thousand lǐ off, so is the next one — which is his standard method in argument, and the reason he wins them and is disliked for it.

My master would truly be starved to death."

餓殺 is deliberate overstatement, starved to death. The threat is rhetorical and the hunger is real, which is the difficulty of the whole chapter in one line.

The old man said: "I will tell you plainly. There are six or seven of us in the household, and we have only just rinsed three shēng of rice into the pot; it is not yet cooked through. Go and try somewhere else, and come back after."

還 is hái: not yet. 別處 has 處 as chù. 升 is the shēng, the smallest rung of the Chinese grain measure — about a litre, so three of them is a modest pot of rice for six or seven people. Keep the detail in mind: not yet cooked, three shēng. Wukong goes and checks it himself in the next passage but one.

Pilgrim said: "The men of old had a saying: better to sit at one house than walk round three. Let this poor monk wait here a while."

A proverb, quoted inside ordinary prose and marked off by the edition's own inner quotation marks rather than set out as a line of verse — so it stays prose. Better to sit at one house than tramp round three: the sort of thing a beggar would say, produced here by the man doing the begging. 罷 is again the sentence-ending ba.

The old man, finding himself pressed hard, lost his temper, raised his goosefoot staff and struck.

纏得緊 takes 得 as the little de that links a verb to how it turned out — pestered, and pestered hard — not dé, to get. 惱了 is the turn from fear into anger, and it is the last thing the old man does under his own steam.

Pilgrim stood there quite unafraid and took seven or eight blows on his bare scalp, which felt to him no more than a scratch for an itch.

只當 has 當 as dàng, to take as or count as, not the dāng of "at the time". 拂癢 is to brush at an itch. The joke rests entirely on a fact the reader knows and the old man does not: this skull has survived Laozi's furnace.

The old man said: "This is a head-butting monk."

撞頭的和尚 — a monk who goes at things head first, or whose head goes into things. The old man has no category for what he has just seen, so he reaches for an insult instead.

Pilgrim laughed and said: "Old fellow, hit me how you please — only keep a clear count of the blows: one blow, one shēng of rice. Measure it out slowly."

Here is the line everybody remembers from this chapter. 老官兒 takes the er ending. 記得 is dé; 杖數 has 數 as the noun shù, a count. 量 is the verb liáng, to measure out, not the noun liàng, a quantity — and the verb is the right one, because what Wukong is proposing is an exchange rate. One blow, one shēng of rice; keep an accurate tally and measure it out slowly. A beating has just been turned into a price list.

At that the old man threw down his goosefoot staff, ran inside and shut the door, shouting all the while: "Ghosts! Ghosts!"

只嚷 is "kept shouting". The scene ends on the same two words it opened with, 有鬼, and the old man is no closer to being right.

The whole household was thrown into a trembling fright, and they shut both the front and the back doors.

慌得 takes 得 as the little de of how it turned out. 一家兒 takes the er ending. The household bolts both doors against a visitor who, by this point in the story, has stopped caring about doors.