拿妖之事 How Did The Taking Go
說不了，那國王也下殿，迎著行者道：「神僧長老來了？拿妖之事如何？」行者用手指道：「那階下不是妖精？被老孫打殺了也。」國王見了道：「是便是個妖屍，卻不是賽太歲。说不了，那国王也下殿，迎着行者道：「神僧长老来了？拿妖之事如何？」行者用手指道：「那阶下不是妖精？被老孙打杀了也。」国王见了道：「是便是个妖尸，却不是赛太岁。
逐句解 Line by line
Before the words were well out, the king came down from the hall too and went to meet Pilgrim: "Divine monk, elder, are you back? How went the business of taking the fiend?"
說不了 takes liǎo on the last character rather than the light le — it is the could-not form: before the speaking could be finished. 長 is zhǎng inside 長老, an elder, and three segments later the same character takes the other reading.
Pilgrim pointed with his hand: "Is that not a fiend, there at the foot of the steps? Old Sun beat him to death."
The answer is a pointed finger and a question, and it commits to nothing. He says a fiend, not the fiend, and lets the king look for himself. Twenty characters, and no name is offered.
The king looked and said: "A fiend's corpse it certainly is, but it is not Sai Taisui.
是便是 concedes the first half in order to deny the second — it is one, right enough, but. The king gets there in seventeen characters, which is faster than Bajie managed while standing over the same body with a rake in his hands.
The king arrives asking the right question and gets a pointed finger for an answer. Wukong does not say who he has killed; he says there is a fiend at the bottom of the steps and that he killed it. Both statements are true and neither is the answer.
And the king catches it immediately. He looks, grants that the thing on the steps is a fiend's corpse, and says it is the wrong one. The chapter has been hard on nearly everybody's reasoning so far; here it gives the king the point.