裝聾推啞 Nobody Answers The Call
更無一人答應。又問，又無人答，都是那裝聾推啞。老魔發怒道：「我等在西方大路上忝著個醜名，今日孫行者這般藐視，若不出去與他見陣，也低了名頭。更无一人答应。又问，又无人答，都是那装聋推哑。老魔发怒道：「我等在西方大路上忝着个丑名，今日孙行者这般藐视，若不出去与他见阵，也低了名头。
逐句解 Line by line
Not one of them answered.
應 is yìng, to answer — the sealed chapters give yìng at all six of their 答應 sites. Six characters, and after two chapters of armour, dressed ranks and a hundred officers, the hall is silent.
He asked again, and again nobody answered. Every one of them was playing deaf and pleading dumb.
裝聾推啞 — putting on deafness and pushing off as mute — is still a live idiom for pretending not to have heard something you do not want to deal with. Applied to an entire army it is a very precise piece of observation about how institutions behave when the request is dangerous.
The old fiend lost his temper: "We hold an ugly name on the great road west, undeservedly. Today Sun Wukong slights us like this — if we do not go out and meet him in the field, our reputation goes down too."
忝著 takes the light zhe — bearing a name and going on bearing it. 忝 is a genuinely humble word, to hold something one does not deserve, and using it about a fearsome reputation is the demon being modest about his own dreadfulness.
This is the funniest failure of morale in the chapter and it costs the book only twenty-five characters. The whole armed establishment that was drawn up in ranks at the third gate declines, twice, by pretending not to hear. Nobody deserts and nobody refuses; they simply become hard of hearing.
The old fiend's response is not courage either, and he says so. He goes out because not going out would damage the name — the same name that has just been confirmed as deserved. Reputation got Wukong into the bottle and it is now pushing a lion out of his own front door.