化作塵土 All Turned To Dust
三藏聽言，諕倒在地，半晌間跌腳拳胸道：「徒弟呀，只說你善會降妖，領我西天見佛，怎知今日死於此怪之手。苦哉，苦哉！我弟子同眾的功勞，如今都化作塵土矣。」三藏听言，諕倒在地，半晌间跌脚拳胸道：「徒弟呀，只说你善会降妖，领我西天见佛，怎知今日死于此怪之手。苦哉，苦哉！我弟子同众的功劳，如今都化作尘土矣。」
逐句解 Line by line
Hearing it, Xuanzang fell to the ground in shock, and after a long moment he stamped and beat his breast: "Disciple! I always said you were good at subduing demons, that you would bring me west to see the Buddha — how was I to know you would die today at this creature's hand?"
諕 is xià and 倒 is dǎo, the falling band — he goes down. 降 is xiáng, to subdue. 跌腳拳胸, stamping the feet and fisting the chest, is the formal choreography of grief in this literature, and it is what the master does before he can speak.
"Bitter, bitter! All the merit my disciples and I earned together is turned now to dust and ashes."
苦哉 doubled stands as its own scrap of text in the source, four characters with its own exclamation mark, and folds forward into the sentence it opens. 功勞 is merit in the ordinary sense of work done and credit earned, but for a pilgrimage it is also the spiritual account — and dust is where it has gone.
Xuanzang's grief is genuine and it is also, characteristically, about himself. The first thing he says is that Wukong was supposed to get him to the Buddha; the second is that the merit is lost. Between the two there is no line about the disciple.
The book is not being cruel here, or not only. This monk has been told since the beginning that the journey is the point and the destination is the reward, and he has just been handed evidence that he will not reach it. His theology and his self-interest have been the same thing for seventy chapters, which is exactly the problem the pilgrimage is supposed to fix.