雙膝跪下 The Abbot Drops To His Knees
那僧雙膝跪下。慌得長老一把扯住道：「院主請起。我問你個路程，你為何行禮？」那僧道：「老師父明日西行，路途平正，不須費心。那僧双膝跪下。慌得长老一把扯住道：「院主请起。我问你个路程，你为何行礼？」那僧道：「老师父明日西行，路途平正，不须费心。
逐句解 Line by line
The monk went down on both knees.
Six characters, and the scene changes temperature. A full double-knee kneel is not how an abbot answers a question about road conditions.
Startled, the Elder caught hold of him with one hand and said, "Abbot, please get up.
慌 here is flustered rather than frightened, and the 得 after it is the unstressed de that links a verb to the state it produces — flustered to the point of grabbing him. This is the second of two such joins in the chapter.
I asked you about a stage of the road. Why are you making obeisance to me?"
為 is wèi here, the why-for-what-reason sense. 行禮 is to perform a formal courtesy, and Tripitaka's bafflement is the point: he asked a travel question and got a ritual.
The monk said, "Old master, tomorrow you go west; the road runs level and true, and you need not trouble yourself over it.
The abbot answers the actual question in nine characters, which tells you the kneeling was never about the road. He is clearing the easy item off the table before he raises the hard one.
This is a beautifully managed piece of misdirection, and it works on the reader exactly as it works on Tripitaka. A question is asked. The answer is a kneel. We spend three lines assuming the road ahead must be terrible.
It is not. The road is level and true. The kneeling was about something else entirely, and the abbot has been carrying it since the moment they walked in.
Note that Tripitaka's first instinct is to reach out and physically pull the man up. For all that this pilgrim is often ineffectual, he is consistently decent, and the novel keeps showing us that decency in small physical gestures rather than announcing it.