禮樂為先 Gentleness Travels the Whole World
他們是此地之怪，我們是遠來之僧，你一身都是手，也要略溫存。你就去叫他做妖怪，他不打你，打我？人將禮樂為先。」他们是此地之怪，我们是远来之僧，你一身都是手，也要略温存。你就去叫他做妖怪，他不打你，打我？人将礼乐为先。」
逐句解 Line by line
"They are fiends of this place and we are monks from far off. You are all hands from head to foot, and even so you might have shown a little warmth."
The middle clause is the odd and memorable one. 你一身都是手 means your whole body is hands, and it is a compliment about capability turned into a reproach: you have every resource, and you used none of them. Behind it sits the practical point about territory — they are local, the pilgrims are not.
"You went and called them monsters. If they had not beaten you, would they have beaten me?"
A rhetorical question with the sting at the end. The implication is that the consequence found exactly the right man.
"Courtesy and music come first with people."
Pilgrim finishes by quoting the Confucian curriculum, which is a startling place for him to end up. 樂 is yuè, music, not the lè of happiness, because the pairing is the ancient one in which rites order conduct and music orders feeling. And 為 is wéi, the linking use meaning to take as or treat as, so the sense is that people put these two first. A monkey demon is lecturing a pig demon on the classics.
The argument Pilgrim actually makes is not moral, it is diplomatic. They are on someone else's ground, outnumbered in the sense that matters, and they need information. Politeness is the tool for the job. He is running a reconnaissance operation and briefing his agent.
The classical tag at the end is the giveaway. Rites and music are the twin pillars of the Confucian ordering of society — rites shape what you do, music shapes what you feel — and by the Ming the phrase had long since become the sort of thing anybody might say to mean mind your manners. Hearing it from Sun Wukong is roughly like hearing a barroom brawler quote Cicero.
The joke has a serious edge, though. This novel keeps handing its Buddhist pilgrims Confucian and Daoist vocabulary, and the mixing is not sloppiness. It is a picture of how an educated Ming reader actually held all three at once.