美人局 The Beauty Trap
三藏聽言，遂變了顏色，跳起來高叫道：「汝等皆是一類怪物，這般誘我。當時只以低行之言，談玄談道可也。如今怎麼以美人局來騙害貧僧？是何道理？」三藏听言，遂变了颜色，跳起来高叫道：「汝等皆是一类怪物，这般诱我。当时只以低行之言，谈玄谈道可也。如今怎么以美人局来骗害贫僧？是何道理？」
逐句解 Line by line
Tripitaka heard it, and his colour changed. He sprang up and cried aloud, "You are every one of you monsters of a kind, and this is how you lure me!
He has not spoken since before the tea was poured, and the first word out of him is 怪物, monsters. Everything up to this point has been conducted on the assumption that these were immortal elders.
"At the time it was only talk of humble conduct, discoursing on the mystery and on the Way, and that was well enough.
當 is dāng in 當時. He is drawing a line across the evening: what came before was acceptable, what has come since is not.
"How is it that now you use a beauty-trap to cheat and injure a poor monk? What sort of conduct is that?"
Two units joined: 是何道理？」 is a four-character tail closing this quotation, carrying no attribution and not a narrator clause. And listen to what he calls it: 美人局 is not a literary phrase at all but the name of a specific criminal trick, in which a woman is used to lure a mark into a position he then has to buy his way out of. Tripitaka has reached out of the polite language of the whole chapter and into thieves' cant.
The whole way of speaking breaks, and it breaks in three characters. For four blocks everyone has talked in the courtesies of a literary evening; Tripitaka now calls his hosts monsters and their arrangement a beauty-trap, which is the ordinary term for a confidence trick worked with a woman.
His complaint is precise and it is not about the poetry. He says that what came before was acceptable — talk of the mystery, talk of the Way, even the argument about his pilgrimage — and that this is something else. He is not repudiating the evening. He is saying that its terms have been changed without his consent.
It is also the first time all night he has refused anything. He was talked out of stopping the linked poem, out of declining a whole one, out of going home, and each time he gave way inside a passage. Here he stands up and shouts.