甚麼洞 What Mountain What Cave
長老道：「你可曾問他此處是甚麼山？甚麼洞？有多少妖怪？那條路通得雷音？」长老道：「你可曾问他此处是甚么山？甚么洞？有多少妖怪？那条路通得雷音？」
逐句解 Line by line
The elder said, "Did you ask him at all what mountain this is?
可曾 is the interrogative have you ever, and its second character has to be forced to céng every single time — left alone the machinery reads it as the surname. Its near twin 不曾 gets there unaided. One character of difference, opposite behaviour. 甚麼 takes shén, against the shèn of the bare 甚 that turns up a few passages later.
What cave?
Three characters, standing as their own segment. It does not close the quotation and so it is not folded backward, however short it is — brevity is not the test. The clipped run of questions is Tripitaka losing patience.
How many demons are there? Which road goes through to Thunder Sound?"
通得 takes dé, the attainment reading — gets through, manages to reach — rather than the unstressed de that hangs a complement on a verb. 雷音 is Thunder Sound, the Buddha's mountain and the whole point of the journey. Four questions, and Pilgrim answered none of them.
Tripitaka does the thing nobody expects of him: he checks the work. Four questions, asked in order, each of them concrete, none of them answerable by reassurance.
It is worth setting them against what he actually got. He asked what mountain, what cave, how many demons and which road; he was told the locals are nervous. The gap between the two is the whole comedy of the passage.
And the fourth question is the real one. Which road goes through to Thunder Sound is not about danger at all — it is about whether the journey can continue, which is the only thing Tripitaka has ever genuinely cared about.