豈是住場 Is This A Place To Lodge
八戒道：「哥呀，這個所在豈是住場？滿山多虎豹狼蟲，遍地有魑魅魍魎，白日裡尚且難行，黑夜裡怎生敢宿？」行者道：「獃子，越發不長進了。不是老孫海口，只這條棒子揝在手裡，就是塌下天來，也撐得住。」八戒道：「哥呀，这个所在岂是住场？满山多虎豹狼虫，遍地有魑魅魍魉，白日里尚且难行，黑夜里怎生敢宿？」行者道：「呆子，越发不长进了。不是老孙海口，只这条棒子揝在手里，就是塌下天来，也撑得住。」
逐句解 Line by line
Eight Rules said, "Brother! Is this any place to be lodging?
住場 is an actual place — somewhere to stay — so 場 is chǎng. The same character is cháng when it counts an episode ("a bout of," "a spell of"), and this chapter uses it both ways. Sense decides which.
"The hills are full of tigers and leopards, wolves and vermin; the ground everywhere has its goblins and its sprites. Even by daylight the going is hard — how should anyone dare sleep here in the dark?"
Eight Rules is doing what he always does when frightened: making a list. 魑魅魍魎 is two ancient compounds welded together, one for hill-demons and one for water-demons, and by the Ming the four characters together mean roughly "things that are not people" — the phrase is still current in Chinese today for a crowd of unsavoury types. 難 here is the adverb nán, "hard to do," not the nàn of a disaster.
Pilgrim said, "Idiot, you get less improvable by the day.
長進 is zhǎng jìn, to grow and advance — 長 in its "grow" sense, not the cháng of length. Pilgrim is telling him he is going backwards.
"This is no big talk from old Sun. With just this cudgel gripped in my hand, if the sky itself came down I could hold it up."
海口 — a mouth as wide as the sea — is exactly our "big talk." 揝 is zǎn, to grip: the imperial dictionary of 1716 files it under the hand radical and glosses it "movement of the hand," treating it as a variant of a commoner character. 得 is again the light de.
Eight Rules objects the way he always does — with an inventory. Beasts first, then demons, then day set against night. He is frightened, but the rhetoric stays tidy, and the tidiness is a good part of what makes him funny.
Pilgrim does not answer a single item on the list. He shifts the ground from what is out there to what is in his hand, and then makes the largest claim available: if the sky fell he would hold it up. In this book that is not quite the empty boast it sounds.
The two speeches set out the pair of temperaments the chapter will keep striking against each other. Eight Rules sees an obstacle and catalogues it; Pilgrim sees an obstacle and proposes to hit it. What is coming is built so that neither habit is much use.