狼蟲虎豹 Wolves and Tigers Perhaps
三藏大驚道：「善哉，善哉！這等深林裡，有甚麼人叫？想是狼蟲虎豹諕倒的，待我看看。」三藏大惊道：「善哉，善哉！这等深林里，有甚么人叫？想是狼虫虎豹諕倒的，待我看看。」
逐句解 Line by line
Tripitaka was greatly startled and said, "Mercy, mercy!
善哉 is the Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit sādhu, "well said, it is good" — a monk's exclamation, roughly where an English speaker would say "bless me."
In a deep wood like this, who could be calling?
He asks who could be calling, not what. The assumption of a person is already made, and it is the assumption the whole trap rests on.
I expect it is somebody frightened off their feet by wolves and tigers. Let me go and look."
諕 is xià, to frighten — a character the novel uses constantly and which most modern readers meet only here. It appears five times in this chapter. 倒 is dǎo, to fall over: frightened until they fell down.
His first instinct is compassion and his second is investigation, and both are creditable. He does not assume a trap. He assumes somebody has been knocked flat by a tiger.
The irony sits in his own guess. He imagines the danger as wolves and tigers, which is what he has been imagining for two hundred passages, and he goes towards the voice specifically because he thinks the danger is elsewhere. The pine-wood rhapsody warned about foxes dressed as pretty women, and he recited that warning himself.