只念出三個 You Read Out Only Three
那長老策馬加鞭，至山門前，見「雷音寺」三個大字，慌得滾下馬來，倒在地下，口裡罵道：「潑猢猻！害殺我也。現是雷音寺，還哄我哩。」行者陪笑道：「師父莫惱，你再看看。山門上乃四個字，你怎麼只念出三個來，倒還怪我？」那长老策马加鞭，至山门前，见「雷音寺」三个大字，慌得滚下马来，倒在地下，口里骂道：「泼猢狲！害杀我也。现是雷音寺，还哄我哩。」行者陪笑道：「师父莫恼，你再看看。山门上乃四个字，你怎么只念出三个来，倒还怪我？」
逐句解 Line by line
The elder whipped his horse forward, and at the front of the mountain gate he saw three great characters reading Thunderclap Monastery. It so alarmed him that he tumbled off the horse and lay flat on the ground, cursing as he went down: "You wretched ape!"
He reads the sign, throws himself off the horse in devotion, and curses the disciple who told him the truth — all in one sentence and all before anybody has looked properly. 倒 is dǎo here, to topple over, not the dào of contradiction that the same character takes a few lines on. 得 in 慌得 is de, linking the fright to what it produced.
"You have been the death of me!"
殺 stuck after a verb is the vernacular intensifier — harmed me to death, worked me to death, bored me to death — and carries none of its literal weight. English does exactly the same thing with the same word.
"It is Thunderclap Monastery, plain in front of us, and you were still fooling me!"
The accusation is the reverse of the truth in a way the elder has not yet noticed. Pilgrim did not fool him, and the sign does not say what he read. 現 is the adverb: right here, plain in front of us.
Pilgrim said with a placating laugh, "Master, do not be angry. Look again."
陪笑 is the laugh of somebody smoothing over an unjust accusation — a placating laugh, the one you produce when the person shouting at you is your superior and wrong. Doubling 看看 makes the imperative casual: go on, have another look.
"There are four characters over the gate. How is it you read out only three, and then blame me for it?"
倒 is dào this time, the adversative — and yet, on the contrary — against the dǎo of falling a few lines back. The two stand fifty-three characters apart in a single scene, which is exactly why the character gets decided at every occurrence rather than fixed once for the whole corpus.
The entire trap is one missing character. Tripitaka reads three characters where there are four, flings himself off his horse in devotion, and curses the disciple who told him the truth.
It is the same failure as the argument about the mountain, run again at closer range and for higher stakes. There he saw a peak that seemed to touch the sky and said it did; here he sees a name resembling the one he wants and reads it as that name. The two scenes stand seven hundred characters apart, and the second one costs something.
Pilgrim's correction is mild and purely factual. He does not press the advantage or go back to his warning about the road — he asks the elder to count. That restraint is what makes the next passage possible, because the case for going in is about to be made on religious grounds, and against those he has nothing.