不見動靜 Nothing Stirring on the Mountain
好大聖，急睜火眼金睛，漫山看處，果然不見動靜。只見那陡崖前，有一座玲瓏剔透細妝花、堆五采、三簷四簇的牌樓。好大圣，急睁火眼金睛，漫山看处，果然不见动静。只见那陡崖前，有一座玲珑剔透细妆花、堆五采、三簷四簇的牌楼。
逐句解 Line by line
Fine Great Sage! He opened wide his fiery eyes and golden pupils, swept the whole mountain with a look, and sure enough saw nothing stirring.
The fiery eyes and golden pupils are Pilgrim's standing equipment, got the hard way: forty-nine days in Laozi's furnace in chapter seven left him smoke-damaged and able to see through any disguise. Here they find nothing, which is the point — the entrance is not hidden by magic, it is simply in an unexpected place.
He saw only that in front of a sheer cliff there stood a decorated archway, delicately carved and openworked, painted in five colours, with three eaves and four clusters of brackets.
A 牌樓 is a free-standing ceremonial gateway, the sort that marks the approach to a temple or a town — and it is standing in the wilderness in front of a cliff, gate to nothing. 三簷四簇 counts the eaves and the bracket clusters, which is how a Ming reader priced a building: this is an expensive one.
The chapter's descent begins with a piece of misdirection. Pilgrim looks for a door and finds a monument, and the monument turns out to be pure signage. Somebody has gone to considerable expense to announce a place with no visible entrance.
The eyes are worth a note of their own. In chapter seven Laozi shut Pilgrim in the eight-trigram furnace to render him down, and he survived by hiding in the wind position, where the smoke ruined his eyes and gave them their power. An injury that became an instrument is a very Chinese sort of gift, and the novel never lets you forget the price.