冬殘春盡 Spring Ends a Peak Rises
四眾行夠多時，又過了冬殘春盡，看不了野花山樹，景物芳菲。前面又見一座高山峻嶺。三藏心驚，問道：「徒弟，前面高山有路無路？是必小心。」四众行够多时，又过了冬残春尽，看不了野花山树，景物芳菲。前面又见一座高山峻岭。三藏心惊，问道：「徒弟，前面高山有路无路？是必小心。」
逐句解 Line by line
The four of them travelled a good long while, and winter's remnant and the last of spring went by, with more wild flowers and hill-trees than the eye could take in, and the whole landscape sweet with growth.
Two whole seasons pass in eleven characters. 冬殘春盡 — winter's leavings, spring exhausted — is the book's standard way of skipping months it has no story for, the equivalent of a caption reading "some time later."
Ahead of them there rose once again a high mountain with steep ridges.
The word 又, "once again," is doing the comic work. The reader has met this sentence perhaps sixty times by now, and so has Tripitaka.
Tripitaka took fright and asked, "Disciples, on that high mountain ahead of us, is there a road or no road?
The question 有路無路 — road or no road — has only one sensible answer, which is why Pilgrim is about to laugh at it.
You must take care."
The line is four characters and needs no more. Tripitaka has one register for mountains and this is it.
This is the hinge of the chapter and it is worth pausing on, because everything that goes wrong later starts from the habit shown here. Tripitaka does not look at the mountain and assess it. He sees a mountain, feels fear, and asks a question that has no useful answer.
Note that his fear is not unfounded — mountains in this book really do have monsters in them, and he really has been carried off from them repeatedly. The trouble is that fear and judgement are different faculties, and he is running the wrong one. Within a few pages he will hear a voice crying for help and his fear will have switched polarity entirely, from suspicion of the landscape to pity for whatever is in it.