沒奈何 Nothing Else For It
八戒道:「沒奈何,我們且去見了師兄,自有解釋。」真個那長老無計,只得跟著八戒、沙僧,挑著擔,牽著馬,同去驛庭之上。八戒道:「没奈何,我们且去见了师兄,自有解释。」真个那长老无计,只得跟着八戒、沙僧,挑着担,牵着马,同去驿庭之上。
逐句解 Line by line
Bajie said, "There's nothing else for it. Let us go and see our elder brother, and an explanation will present itself."
沒奈何 — no way of dealing with it — is one of the most useful phrases in vernacular Chinese and still in daily use. It covers everything from "can't be helped" to "we have no choice," and Bajie deploys it here as a way of ending a conversation he is losing.
Truly the elder had no plan of his own, so he could only follow Bajie and Sha Monk, with the luggage carried on the pole and the horse led by the bridle, and go together to the courtyard of the hostel.
Three 著 in one sentence, all of them zhe, the reading that marks an action still going on: following, carrying, leading. Ranged against the zhuó and zháo of earlier passages, this is the commonest of the four jobs the character does. 挑著擔,牽著馬 is a fixed pair the novel uses whenever the party moves — a two-clause shorthand for packing up and setting off.
The formula about the pole and the bridle appears dozens of times in the book, and by this point in the journey it functions almost as punctuation: whenever you see it, the pilgrims are on the move again.
It also quietly reasserts the hierarchy. Wukong is in the sky settling matters of state; the other three are on the ground with the baggage. The novel never loses track of who is carrying what.