不可前進 You Must Not Go On
遠遠的立在那山坡上高呼：「西進的長老，且暫住驊騮，緊兜玉勒。這山上有一夥妖魔，吃盡了閻浮世上人，不可前進。」远远的立在那山坡上高呼：「西进的长老，且暂住骅骝，紧兜玉勒。这山上有一伙妖魔，吃尽了阎浮世上人，不可前进。」
逐句解 Line by line
Standing far off on the hillside he called out: "Elder bound for the west, hold that fine horse of yours a moment, draw the jade bit tight.
He shouts in a far grander register than the scene deserves. 驊騮 names a legendary horse, counted among the eight steeds of King Mu of Zhou, and Tripitaka is riding an ordinary white horse; 玉勒 is a jade bit. A dusty monk is being hailed as though he were a nobleman out hunting. 勒 is lè, the bit that sits in a horse's mouth, not the lēi of hauling a rope tight — the corpus gives lè at all fifteen of its sealed sites.
There is a band of demons on this mountain who have eaten up every human being in the world of Jambudvipa. You must not go on."
閻浮 is Sanskrit again — Jambudvipa, the rose-apple continent, which in Buddhist geography is the world where human beings live and so means, in practice, here. 盡 is jìn, used up: the demons have not eaten some people, they have finished them. It is an enormous claim, delivered by a stranger at a distance, to a man who was told a moment ago that every mountain has a road.
The warning is pitched to be believed and it is built out of two very different registers. The first half is courtly — the horse is a legend, the bit is jade, the address is formal. The second half is a flat piece of horror with a number in it that cannot possibly be true.
That mixture is the point. A stranger who talks like that is either a person of consequence or somebody working hard to sound like one, and the novel gives you no way to tell yet. It simply lets him shout from far enough off that nobody can see his face.
And the timing is unkind. Pilgrim has just staked his authority on a proverb about roads always existing, and the mountain answers within a few lǐ with a man saying this one ends in being eaten.