兩三時辰 Where Were You Those Hours
八戒道：「哥哥，你昨日巳時離了師父，怎麼到申時才與他鬥起？你那兩三個時辰在那裡的？」八戒道：「哥哥，你昨日巳时离了师父，怎么到申时才与他斗起？你那两三个时辰在那里的？」
逐句解 Line by line
Eight Rules said: "Brother, you left the master at the hour of sì yesterday. How is it you did not fall to fighting him until shēn?
Eight Rules does the arithmetic, which is not what the reader expects of him. 巳時 is nine to eleven in the morning and 申時 three to five in the afternoon, so the question is about a gap of some six hours. It is the second time in this chapter he has caught the Great Sage out.
"Where were you those two or three double-hours?"
Both readings of 那 stand inside one eleven-character line. 那裡 is the question word nǎ, "where were you", while the 那 seven characters earlier in 你那兩三個時辰 is the ordinary pointing one. 時辰 is the double-hour, one twelfth of a day.
Eight Rules asks the one question nobody has asked, and he asks it arithmetically. The master was left at the hour of sì; the fighting began at shēn; that is a gap of some six hours, and where were they spent? It is a small piece of accounting and entirely characteristic of him — he has been counting since the chapter began, first the delay he was blamed for and now somebody else's.
The question also does structural work. It obliges the Great Sage to narrate the whole of the previous chapter, which the reader has seen but Eight Rules has not, and it gets that narration done as an answer under examination rather than as a boast. The last time he told this story, he was telling it to a demon wearing his brother's shape.