土地老兒 The Old Local God
好大聖，按落雲頭，捻著訣，念聲「唵」字真言，把個土地老兒又拘來了。戰兢兢跪下路旁，叩頭道：「大聖，你去救你師父的，為何又轉來也？」好大圣，按落云头，捻着诀，念声「唵」字真言，把个土地老儿又拘来了。战兢兢跪下路旁，叩头道：「大圣，你去救你师父的，为何又转来也？」
逐句解 Line by line
Splendid Great Sage! He pressed his cloud down, made the finger-sign, spoke the syllable Om, and had the old earth god hauled up before him once more.
唵 is Om, the opening syllable of Sanskrit mantra, transcribed into Chinese and used throughout this book as the summoning word. 真言, true word, is the standard Chinese rendering of mantra. 捻著訣 is making a hand-sign — 訣 here is a finger seal, a mudra — with 著 as zhe. And 拘 is the word for a magistrate having someone brought in: this is an arrest warrant, not an invitation.
Trembling, the god knelt at the roadside and knocked his head on the ground. "Great Sage — you went off to rescue your master. Why have you come back?"
戰兢兢 is shaking with fear, the same tripled intensifier the seven women used about their own escape. 叩頭 is the kowtow proper, knocking the forehead on the floor. The earth god is a god, and he is prostrate in the dust because a monkey has whistled for him.
The comedy of rank is the whole point of this scene and the book never tires of it. A local earth god is a genuine deity with a genuine shrine, and he is on his knees in the road shaking, because the Great Sage Equal to Heaven has spoken a syllable and pulled him out of his own parish for the second time today.
The word 拘 does the work. It is legal vocabulary — to summon by warrant, to have brought in for questioning — and it puts the encounter in a register any reader would recognise from a courtroom. Pilgrim is not asking a god for help. He is compelling a witness.
And the god's question is the one an overworked official would ask. You went to deal with it; why are you back? There is a whole civil service behind that line, and the novel's celestial bureaucracy is funny precisely because it behaves exactly like a real one.