此是素的 This Food Is Vegetarian
眾女子笑道：「長老，此是素的。」長老道：「阿彌陀佛！若像這等素的啊，我和尚吃了，莫想見得世尊，取得經卷。」众女子笑道：「长老，此是素的。」长老道：「阿弥陀佛！若像这等素的啊，我和尚吃了，莫想见得世尊，取得经卷。」
逐句解 Line by line
The women smiled and said, "Elder, this food is vegetarian."
Eleven characters, said pleasantly, and it is a flat lie about the contents of a bowl the reader has just watched being filled. The smile is doing the work.
The Elder said, "Amitabha Buddha!"
阿彌陀佛 is Amitābha, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, and the reading is ē mí tuó fó — the transcription of a Sanskrit name, not the everyday ā that starts a sigh. It is the standard exclamation of a Chinese monk, roughly where an English speaker would say heaven help us.
"If that is what vegetarian food looks like, then this monk who eats it may give up all thought of ever setting eyes on the World-Honoured One or laying hands on the scriptures."
Two 得 in one breath, both dé, both meaning to manage or succeed in — 見得 to get to see, 取得 to get to fetch. 世尊 is the World-Honoured One, a title of the Buddha; and everything he stands to lose is named in a single clause.
The lie is delivered with a smile, and the reader is the only one in the room who can check it. That gap — between what we watched in the kitchen and what he is being told at the table — is the engine of the whole scene.
His exclamation is worth a moment. Calling on Amitābha is what a Chinese monk says when startled, dismayed, or bracing himself, in much the way an English speaker says heaven help us. He has said 善哉 once already, sitting down at the stone table; this is the first time he names a Buddha.
And the refusal is total. He does not say the food is unappetising or that he is not hungry. He says that eating it costs him the Buddha and the scriptures — the entire journey, everything the book has been about since he set out. Whatever else he has got wrong today, the moment somebody asks him to break the precept he does not waver for a character.