別人棺材 Weeping Over Another Mans Coffin
八戒近前道：「師父，你是怎的起哩？專把別人棺材擡在自家家裡哭。不要煩惱。常言道：『君教臣死，臣不死不忠；父教子亡，子不亡不孝。』八戒近前道：「师父，你是怎的起哩？专把别人棺材抬在自家家里哭。不要烦恼。常言道：『君教臣死，臣不死不忠；父教子亡，子不亡不孝。』
逐句解 Line by line
Bajie came up and said, "Master, what has come over you?
怎的起哩 is colloquial and faintly exasperated — what has got into you.
"Always hauling other people's coffins into your own house to weep over.
One of the best lines Bajie is ever given, and it is a proverb: to carry another man's coffin home and cry over it, meaning to take on grief that is not yours. 擡 tái is to lift and carry between people, which is exactly what you do with a coffin.
"Do not distress yourself.
Four characters of comfort, and everything after them undoes it.
"As the old saying goes: if a lord bids his subject die, the subject who does not die is disloyal; if a father bids his son perish, the son who does not perish is unfilial."
The two halves are built on one frame, which is why they are set here as a single sentence. The saying is a hardened popular version of the loyalty and filial duty that Confucian teaching actually argued about at length — the classics themselves insist that a subject must remonstrate with a wicked ruler. Bajie is quoting the bumper-sticker form, and using it to justify doing nothing.
Bajie is not being wicked here, he is being ordinary, and that is what makes the passage uncomfortable. Everything he says is a thing people say: it is not your country, you cannot help, do not upset yourself, the ruler has the right.
The proverb about the coffin is genuinely funny and genuinely brutal. It exists because taking on other people's grief is a recognisable human failing, and the chapter has arranged for it to be aimed at the one character who has responded to eleven hundred and eleven condemned children by crying.
The quotation that follows is the argument beneath the joke, and it is worth knowing that it is a corruption. The Confucian tradition holds that a minister who watches his lord do wrong in silence has failed in his duty. Bajie has reached for the version that lets everyone off.