前後做賊 The Whole Story Of The Theft
國王又問：「龍婆能人言語否？」八戒道：「乃是龍王之妻，生了許多龍子、龍孫，豈不知人言？」國王道：「既知人言，快早說前後做賊之事。」龍婆道：「偷佛寶，我全不知，都是我那夫君龍鬼與那駙馬九頭蟲，知你塔上之光乃是佛家舍利子，三年前下了血雨，乘機盜去。」国王又问：「龙婆能人言语否？」八戒道：「乃是龙王之妻，生了许多龙子、龙孙，岂不知人言？」国王道：「既知人言，快早说前后做贼之事。」龙婆道：「偷佛宝，我全不知，都是我那夫君龙鬼与那驸马九头虫，知你塔上之光乃是佛家舍利子，三年前下了血雨，乘机盗去。」
逐句解 Line by line
The king asked again, "Can the dragon dame speak the speech of men?"
No graph in this segment stands in any guard roster. 否 at the end turns the statement into a question in the literary manner, and the king puts it to Eight Rules rather than to the prisoner standing in front of him.
Eight Rules said, "She is a dragon king's wife and has borne a great many dragon sons and dragon grandsons — how should she not know the speech of men?"
龍子 takes 子 at zǐ, the full noun-morpheme, as it has at every occurrence in this chapter. 不 takes bù before the level 知 zhī. The answer is a piece of reasoning about rank, and the sons and grandsons it cites are the ones killed in the last few passages.
The king said, "Since she knows it, let her tell out at once the whole story of the thieving, first and last."
No graph in this segment stands in any guard roster. 前後 — first and last — is the same pair used of the account the two maimed fiends gave this dragon's own household at the start of the chapter. The proceeding is a deposition, and the vocabulary says so.
The dragon dame said, "Of the stealing of the Buddha-treasure I know nothing whatever. It was my husband the dragon spirit and that son-in-law, the Nine-Headed Worm: knowing that the light on your pagoda was a Buddhist śarīra, three years ago they sent down a rain of blood and took their chance to steal it away."
舍利 is a registered transcription taking shè lì, and the spec given here matches that registration rather than overriding it — the first of four in this stretch, out of the chapter's five. 乘 is chéng, to avail oneself of, and 佛 stands at fó at both of its sites here. 龍鬼 is printed where 龍王 would be expected, and is encoded as it stands.
The chapter ends as the one before it did, with a captured fiend giving evidence before a throne. The form is exact: the court establishes that the witness can be understood, orders a full account, and gets one. Nobody threatens her and nobody needs to.
Her deposition does what depositions do — it distributes blame. She knows nothing of the Buddha-treasure; it was her husband and her son-in-law. Both of them are dead or fled, which makes the account unfalsifiable and, as far as the reader can tell from the previous chapter's evidence, true.
It also fills the last gap in the story. Until now nobody has explained what the rain of blood was for. It was cover — 乘機, taking the chance it made — and three years after the fact that is the first time anyone has said so.