When Tripitaka heard this, it was as though his star of ill luck had come round.

晦氣星到了 — his unlucky star had come round — is the narrator speaking, not the master. The lapse is marked as fated in the same breath as it is shown to be freely chosen, and the novel does not think these two things are in conflict.

So he did as the idiot said, and all together they stepped outside the ring.

Ten characters for the act the entire chapter turns on. The novel gives it no more room than that, and no comment at all.

Bajie led the horse, Sha Monk shouldered the load, and the elder followed the road forward on foot.

擔了擔 carries both readings of the character in three characters: first the verb dān, to shoulder, then the noun dàn, the load being shouldered. 長老 is zhǎng lǎo.

Before long they came to the place of the towers, which proved to be a house set with its back to the north and its face to the south.

坐北向南, back to the north and face to the south, is the correct and auspicious orientation for a proper dwelling — the thing a Chinese reader would check first. Everything about this building is right, which is exactly what makes it convincing.

Outside the gate was a splayed whitewashed screen wall, and a gate-tower of the shēng-and-dǒu sort with a pendant lotus, all of it painted in the five colours.

八字粉牆 is a whitewashed screen wall splayed outward like the two strokes of the character 八. 倒垂蓮 is the hanging-lotus bracket, with 倒 as dào, upside down. 升斗 names a bracket-set shaped like the stacked grain measures, the shēng and the dǒu — roughly a litre and ten litres — so 斗 here reads dǒu, the measure, and not dòu, to fight. The novel is showing off a builder's vocabulary, and every term is genuine.

The gate itself stood half open and half closed.

半開半掩, half open and half closed. Seven characters of invitation. The novel has spent a whole passage certifying the house as respectable and now leaves the door ajar.

Bajie tied the horse to the stone drum at the gatepost; Sha Monk set down his load; and Tripitaka, who feared the wind, sat down on the threshold.

Three clauses divided by semicolons inside one sentence, joined here into a single segment. 擔子 has 擔 as the noun dàn. 畏風, fearing the wind, is the master's stated reason for sitting — and the reason he sits on the threshold instead of going in, which will turn out to matter very little.

Bajie said: "Master, this place must be the mansion of a duke or a marquis, the house of a chief minister. There is nobody outside the front gate — they will all be inside warming themselves at the fire."

相輔 is a chief minister, so 相 reads xiàng, not xiāng. 烘火 is warming yourself at a fire. Watch the reasoning: Bajie wants a fire, so he reads an empty forecourt as evidence that everyone is indoors round one.

You sit here, and let me go in and take a look."

坐著 uses zhe for a continuing state. The phrase Wukong used before he left — sit here — is now in the mouth of the one who talked them out of sitting.

The Tang Monk said: "Take care, and do not go giving offence to the household."

仔細 is zǐ xì. The master's worry has narrowed to manners. He has stopped considering danger altogether.

The idiot said: "I know that. Ever since I turned to the gate of Chan I have picked up a few of the proprieties, and I am not the boor of a villager I was."

曉得 has 得 as dé. 禮數 has 數 as the noun shù: the forms of courtesy, the done thing. Bajie claims to have acquired manners while standing in the gateway of a house he is about to ransack.