念念我聽 Read It Out And Let Me Hear
你且念念我聽。」行者道：你且念念我听。」行者道：
逐句解 Line by line
Read it out and let me hear it."
The device is old and efficient: rather than describe the document, the novel has one character ask another to read it aloud, so the reader gets the whole text with an audience already attached to it.
Pilgrim said:
Three characters, and then a legal instrument. The novel sets the plaint off from the narrative the way it sets off a poem, which is a fair guide to how it wants the thing read.
"The accuser is Sun Wukong. His age and particulars are on the register. He is a disciple of the Tang Tripitaka, a monk of the Tang court of the Eastern Land, sent west to fetch scriptures.
The plaint opens with the formula every real Ming plaint opened with: who is accusing, and on what standing. 年甲在牒 is age and particulars on the register — an official already holds his details, so he need not recite them. 朝 is cháo, a court or dynasty, not the zhāo of morning. 三藏 is the Sanskrit Tripitaka, the three baskets of the canon, used as the monk's name.
What follows is a piece of real legal drafting, and it is correct. The opening clause establishes the accuser, his standing and his authority to bring the case, in the order a Ming court required.
It is also laid out on the page the way a poem is laid out, indented and stood apart from the narrative around it. Chinese fiction does that to any document it quotes whole — an edict, a letter, a sutra — because what is being marked is not that the words rhyme but that somebody wrote them down.