各人散火 You Go Back To Eating People
八戒道：「分開了，各人散火：你往流沙河，還去吃人；我往高老莊，看看我渾家。將白馬賣了，與師父買個壽器送終。」長老氣呼呼的聞得此言，叫皇天，放聲大哭。且不題。八戒道：「分开了，各人散火：你往流沙河，还去吃人；我往高老庄，看看我浑家。将白马卖了，与师父买个寿器送终。」长老气呼呼的闻得此言，叫皇天，放声大哭。且不题。
逐句解 Line by line
Bajie said, "Split it up and everyone breaks camp: you go back to the Flowing Sand River and carry on eating people;"
散火 is to scatter the fire — to break up a company, wind up a partnership. 還 is hái, still or again, the adverb. And Sha Monk really was a man-eating sand-demon at that river before Guanyin recruited him, which is a thing Bajie has just said to his face.
"I will go to Gao Village and look in on my wife."
高老莊 is where Bajie was living as a farmer's son-in-law when Wukong dragged him out of it thirty-odd chapters ago, and 渾家 is a homely old word for a wife. He has been meaning to go back the entire journey.
"We sell the white horse and buy the master a coffin to see him out."
壽器 — longevity vessel — is the polite word for a coffin, and the euphemism is genuinely kind. Bajie has thought about the master's funeral arrangements, which is more than the other proposals suggest.
The elder, hearing this and puffing with rage, called on August Heaven and wept aloud.
聞得 keeps the full dé, as every verb of perception in this project does. 氣呼呼 is another doubled tail — and the master, who was weeping already, is now weeping furiously.
But of that no more for the moment.
The storyteller setting a thread down, exactly as at the end of the bottling scene. The chapter is about to cut back to the cave.
The plan is completely worked out, which is what makes it funny and what makes it damning. Bajie has allocated a destination to each of them, a use for the horse, and a funeral for the master, in the time it took Xuanzang to stop crying. This is not panic. It is a proposal.
The two halves of the first line are a near-perfect pair — you to the river, I to the village, verb and object on each side — and they very nearly join into one unit here. What stops it is the lead-in Bajie puts in front of the first half and not the second, which is the same thing that has spoiled almost every candidate in this chapter.