千乞留名 Leave Me Your Name
行者慌忙禮拜道：「是那位菩薩？我弟子鑽昏了，不能相識，千乞留名，好謝。」只見那半空中叫道：「大聖，是我。」行者慌忙礼拜道：「是那位菩萨？我弟子钻昏了，不能相识，千乞留名，好谢。」只见那半空中叫道：「大圣，是我。」
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim hastily made obeisance. "Which bodhisattva is this?"
禮拜 is full formal worship, not the bow of 唱喏 a few passages back — he has gone from courtesy to reverence in one sentence. And the question is asked to an empty road.
"Your disciple has bored himself stupid and could not recognise you. I beg you a thousand times, leave your name, that I may thank you properly."
鑽昏了 is the joke of the passage: bored-myself-dizzy, from the twenty li of tunnelling he did as a pangolin. He is offering it as the excuse for not recognising a deity. 弟子 — disciple — is how a devotee addresses a divinity, and 千乞 is a thousand entreaties. 相識 takes 相 as xiāng, to know one another.
And a voice called down from the middle air, "Great Sage — it is I."
半空中 is halfway up the sky, the standard place for a deity to speak from. Five characters of speech, and the whole reveal is in the last two: 是我, it is I.
The apology is the funniest line in the chapter and it is entirely sincere. 我弟子鑽昏了 — your disciple has bored himself dizzy — offered to a bodhisattva as the reason he failed to recognise her. He has spent the afternoon as a burrowing animal and he thinks it has affected his judgement.
What he asks for is a name, and the reason he gives is that he wants to thank her properly. In a cosmology this bureaucratic, that is not politeness — it is procedure. You cannot discharge an obligation to somebody you cannot identify.
And the answer comes from the middle air in two characters. 是我, it is I — which tells him nothing at all unless he already knows the voice, and he does.