三秋霜景 Autumn Frost On The Road
話表三藏遵菩薩教旨，收了行者，與八戒、沙僧剪斷二心，鎖籠猿馬，同心戮力，趕奔西天。說不盡光陰似箭，日月如梭。歷過了夏月炎天，卻又值三秋霜景。话表三藏遵菩萨教旨，收了行者，与八戒、沙僧剪断二心，锁笼猿马，同心戮力，赶奔西天。说不尽光阴似箭，日月如梭。历过了夏月炎天，却又值三秋霜景。
逐句解 Line by line
The tale relates that Tripitaka, obedient to the Bodhisattva's instruction, took Pilgrim back; and with Eight Rules and Sha Monk he severed the two minds, caged the ape and the horse, joined heart and strength together, and hastened on toward the West.
Business first: the quarrel of the last chapter is closed in a single sentence of stock phrases. 話表 opens the prose instead of the usual 話說. 二心, "the two minds," points back to the false Pilgrim who had to be destroyed. 猿馬 is shorthand for 心猿意馬, the mind-ape and the will-horse — the restless pair a practitioner is supposed to tether, and here the novel is being cheerfully literal, since one of them is an actual ape and the other an actual horse. 奔 takes bèn when it means heading for somewhere, against the bēn of 奔波, rushing about.
There is no telling how the light and shade flew by like arrows, how sun and moon shot past like a weaver's shuttle.
Two of the most worn similes in the language, used deliberately as filler. 說不盡, "there is no telling," is the storyteller declining to narrate an interval. 似 reads sì throughout this project.
They had come through the blazing heat of the summer months, and now met the frosted scenes of deep autumn.
The line that matters. 三秋 is not three autumns but the third month of autumn — the ninth month of the year, late autumn. The season is being nailed down on purpose, because the heat the pilgrims are about to walk into has no business existing in it.
The reconciliation is disposed of in one sentence of formulas: the two minds severed, ape and horse caged, hearts and strength joined. Piling up set phrases like this is how a storyteller shuts an episode quickly so a new one can start. Nothing is acted out; you are told the quarrel is over and moved along.
Time gets the same treatment. Arrows and the weaver's shuttle are the two most standard similes available for it, and 說不盡 — there is no telling — openly refuses to narrate the gap. All of which exists to deliver the last four words: the pilgrims have crossed from summer into late autumn.
That detail is load-bearing. The heat they are about to meet would be unremarkable in July and is uncanny in the ninth month. The narrator has fixed the calendar precisely so that the next scene can break it, and the disciples' entire argument about the cause turns on the mismatch.