成此姻眷 To Make This Match
孤直公道：「聖僧乃有道有名之士，決不苟且行事。如此樣舉措，是我等取罪過了。污人名，壞人德，非遠達也。果是杏仙有意，可教拂雲叟與十八公做媒，我與凌空子保親，成此姻眷，何不美哉？」孤直公道：「圣僧乃有道有名之士，决不苟且行事。如此样举措，是我等取罪过了。污人名，坏人德，非远达也。果是杏仙有意，可教拂云叟与十八公做媒，我与凌空子保亲，成此姻眷，何不美哉？」
逐句解 Line by line
The Duke of Lonely Uprightness said, "The holy monk is a man of the Way and of reputation; he will certainly not act in any loose fashion.
苟且 is doing a thing carelessly or improperly, and in matters of this kind it is the standard word for an irregular liaison.
"To behave in this way is for us to bring guilt on ourselves.
The objection is to the manner, not to the aim, and the next two segments make that unmistakable.
"To soil a man's name and spoil his virtue is not the act of the far-seeing.
Three clauses of three, three and four characters. The moral vocabulary is exact and it is being spent entirely on procedure.
"If the Apricot Immortal is truly minded to it, let the Cloud-Brusher and the Eighteenth Duke be go-betweens, and the Master Who Rides the Void and myself stand surety for the match. Make the marriage properly — would that not be excellent?"
做媒 and 保親 are the two offices a Chinese betrothal required — the go-between who makes the match and the guarantor who stands surety for it — and all four elders are assigned one apiece. 教 is the causative jiào.
The Duke of Lonely Uprightness appears to be intervening on Tripitaka's behalf and he is not. His objection is that soiling a man's name is beneath them — that is, that the method is crude. He does not say the aim is wrong. He proposes a better method.
What he proposes is a wedding, with the offices correctly filled: two go-betweens and two guarantors, one part for each of the four of them. It is the most typical thing the chapter does. These spirits have spent the whole evening unable to imagine a difficulty that could not be dissolved by observing the right form, and faced with a monk who will not break his vow, they reach for the form that would make breaking it respectable.
It is also the point at which the four of them stop being separate people. They have been kept carefully distinct all evening — the pine, the cypress, the juniper, the bamboo, each with a name and a manner and a poem — and here they are simply four men arranging a match, with the parts handed out as if for a village wedding.