分毫不受 Not A Fraction Accepted
話表祭賽國王謝了唐三藏師徒獲寶擒怪之恩，所贈金玉，分毫不受。卻命當駕官照依四位常穿的衣服各做兩套，鞋襪各做兩雙，絛環各做兩條，外備乾糧烘炒，倒換了通關文牒，大排鑾駕，並文武多官、滿城百姓、伏龍寺僧人，大吹大打，送四眾出城。約有二十里，先辭了國王。眾人又送二十里辭回。话表祭赛国王谢了唐三藏师徒获宝擒怪之恩，所赠金玉，分毫不受。却命当驾官照依四位常穿的衣服各做两套，鞋袜各做两双，绦环各做两条，外备干粮烘炒，倒换了通关文牒，大排銮驾，并文武多官、满城百姓、伏龙寺僧人，大吹大打，送四众出城。约有二十里，先辞了国王。众人又送二十里辞回。
逐句解 Line by line
The story tells how the king of Jisai, grateful to the Tang Master and his disciples for the kindness of recovering the treasure and taking the fiend, offered them gold and jade, of which they would accept not the smallest fraction.
A king has just tried to pay for a rescue and been turned down flat, and the story's first act is to record how flat. 分毫 is not a vague "nothing": a fēn and a háo are two of the smallest rungs on the old decimal ladder of weights, so the phrase means something nearer "not a gram, not a milligram" — and the English keeps the measure rather than flattening it. The opening tag is worth a glance too. Storytellers normally start a chapter with 話說, "the story says"; this one uses 話表, "the story sets forth", which turns up exactly once here and in no tag list the project has carried. 賽 keeps its one reading sài inside the kingdom's name.
Instead he ordered the officer of the royal carriage to have two suits made for each of the four after the pattern of the habits they commonly wore, two pairs of shoes and stockings apiece, two sashes and rings apiece, and dry rations and parched grain provided besides. The travel rescript was endorsed and returned, the imperial equipage drawn up in state, and with the civil and military officers, the people of the whole city, and the monks of the Fulong Monastery, amid a great blowing and drumming, the four were seen out of the city.
The king cannot give treasure, so he gives kit — and the inventory runs on because the length is the gift. 乾糧 is gān liáng, dry food for the road; pypinyin, the automatic pronunciation tool the project builds its ruby from, reads the first character qián here, its sense in the eight trigrams, and the guard forces the right one. 倒換 at dào is a piece of officialese: not swapping one thing for another but handing a document in to be stamped and given back. 絛環 pairs the silk cord with the ring it runs through, which is why the English keeps both.
At about twenty lǐ the king was the first to take his leave.
Distance is given in lǐ, the Chinese road-mile, and the project never converts it. A lǐ ran to something near 560 metres in Ming reckoning — roughly a third of an English mile — so turning it into miles would nearly treble every journey in the book. It is romanised for the same reason zhàng, chǐ and cùn are: English has no borrowed name for it, and borrowing an English one instead quietly relocates the story to England. Note that this is not the same character as the 裡 of "inside", which this edition writes separately and which is translated normally.
The rest of the company saw them a further twenty lǐ and then turned back.
Two motions ride inside one verb. 辭回 is taking your leave and going home at once, and English needs both halves to say it.
The chapter opens where the last one closed, on a refusal. Jisai's king has already had his gold and jade declined once, at the end of the pagoda affair, and the narrator's first job here is to record that the refusal held — not a fēn, not a háo. What follows is the king's workaround. If treasure will not be taken, then clothing will: two suits apiece, cut to the pattern the pilgrims already wear, shoes, stockings, sashes, rings, and food for the road.
The distinction matters more than it looks. Gold and jade would be payment, and payment turns a religious obligation into a settled debt. Clothes and rations are provision, and provision leaves the obligation open. The king has found the one form of generosity a begging monk can accept without ceasing to be one, and the narrator lets the inventory run at length precisely because the length is the point: this is lavishness carefully routed around a vow.
The stamping of the travel papers is the fifth of eleven clauses in that sentence and passes without comment. It is the one item in the send-off that is not a gift at all but paperwork, and its quiet presence among the sashes and the parched grain is a reminder that the pilgrimage is also a journey through jurisdictions, every one of which wants to see the document.