路貧貧殺人 Poverty On The Road Kills
行者笑道：「說那裡話？古人云：『在家不是貧？路貧貧殺人。』你是住家兒的，何以言貧！像我們這行腳僧，才是真貧哩。行者笑道：「说那里话？古人云：『在家不是贫？路贫贫杀人。』你是住家儿的，何以言贫！像我们这行脚僧，才是真贫哩。
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim laughed. "What kind of talk is that?"
說那裡話 is a set retort — literally "where does that talk come from", meaning don't be absurd, you're too kind. It is what you say when somebody has just been self-deprecating, and Pilgrim is playing along.
"As the ancients said: at home, is that poverty? It is poverty on the road that kills a man."
⚠ A proverb, and a good one. The contrast is between being short of money under your own roof — where there is a bed, a pot and neighbours — and being short of it on the road, where there is nothing. 貧殺人 is "poverty kills people", with 殺 as a violent intensifier of the kind Chinese uses freely: 笑殺人, to be killed laughing, works the same way.
"You are a man with a home. How can you talk of being poor?"
住家兒的 is one who lives in a house, a settled householder. It is a small dig dressed as a compliment: you have walls and a door, so whatever you are, you are not poor in the sense that matters.
"It is people like us, monks who go on foot, who are the truly poor."
行腳僧 is a foot-travelling monk — 行腳, to walk on one's feet, is the technical term for the wandering religious life, and it is still the word. Pilgrim is claiming the higher poverty, which is a joke, because he has spent the last minute establishing that his host's poverty is not to be taken seriously.
Pilgrim answers a lie with a proverb, and the exchange is genuinely funny. The Daoist has pleaded poverty to explain his odd cup; Pilgrim tells him he does not know what poverty is, because he sleeps indoors. It is banter of a very high order, and it is a probe.
The proverb itself is worth keeping: at home you can be poor and survive it, but poverty on the road kills. Anyone who has travelled without money will recognise the distinction exactly. In a novel that is entirely about being on the road, it is also a small thesis statement.
What makes the passage tense is that neither man is discussing the tea. They are trading courtesies about relative poverty while one of them tries to work out whether the other has noticed, and the other tries to work out what is in the cup he is holding. Not one word of it is about the actual subject.