拿他來搪塞 He Saved My Life
長老道：「虧他救了我命哩。你兄弟們打上他門，嚷著要我，想是拿他來搪塞；不然啊，就殺了我也。還把他埋一埋，見我們出家人之意。」长老道：「亏他救了我命哩。你兄弟们打上他门，嚷着要我，想是拿他来搪塞；不然啊，就杀了我也。还把他埋一埋，见我们出家人之意。」
逐句解 Line by line
The elder said, "We owe him our lives.
Ten characters, and they turn the whole passage round. 虧 is to be indebted for — thanks to him. Tripitaka has grasped in a moment what Bajie has not: the head bought them time.
You brothers went hammering at their gate, hollering that you wanted me back, and I suppose they took him to fob you off with;
搪塞, to fob off, is exactly the modern word for palming somebody off with something inadequate, and here it names what was done with a dead man's head. 嚷著要我 takes 著 as zhe for shouting kept up. The source cuts here at a semicolon, but the two halves are not a matched pair — nineteen characters against eight, and the second moves to what would have happened instead.
otherwise they would have killed me.
Eight characters, and this is the sentence that makes the argument. The fiends had a monk to hand and needed a head; they chose one already in stock. 不然 is otherwise, if it were not so.
Bury him again, and let it show what people in holy orders mean by it."
埋一埋 doubles the verb around a numeral, which makes it brief and unfussy — give him a bit of a burial. 出家人之意 is the intention proper to somebody who has left home for religion, and it is the same argument Bajie himself made over the pebbles: what matters is what the act says about the doer.
Tripitaka's reasoning is cool and it is correct. The fiends needed a head to prove a death; if they had not had one in the flaying pavilion, they would have made one out of him. An anonymous corpse stood in for him and he knows it.
The instruction to rebury is Bajie's own argument handed back to him. He told Wukong at the graveside that an offering shows the feeling of the living rather than feeding the dead. His master now tells him to bury a stranger on exactly that ground, and he does it without a word.