喏喏相辭 The Woodcutter Bows and Turns Back
那樵子喏喏相辭，復回本路。師徒遂一直投西。正是：那樵子喏喏相辞，复回本路。师徒遂一直投西。正是：
逐句解 Line by line
The woodcutter took his leave with bow after bow and went back the way he had come.
喏 is rě, a spoken salute made with a bow — and it is doubled here, so both characters take it. The reading is not the one the machinery reaches for, and a single correction would have caught only the first of the pair. 相辭 takes 相 as xiāng, the mutual reading: they took leave of each other.
Master and disciples then went straight on westward.
Seven characters, and the party is back on the road. 投西 is to head west, the phrase this novel uses hundreds of times to close an episode.
And so it was:
Two characters, the cue for the matched pair of lines that closes every chapter's action.
Subduing the fiend, he loosed the wrong and left the bitter straits; receiving kindness, he took the road with a mind set on the work.
The two lines of the closing pair balance what was done against what was received. 降怪 takes 降 as xiáng, to subdue — not the descending reading — and it is the chapter's only occurrence. 苦厄 is the bitter straits of Buddhist usage, the suffering a being is caught in; and 用心行, to walk with the mind applied, answers the master's own question about when the walking will be done.
The closing pair sums the chapter in fourteen characters, and it puts the two halves side by side: a fiend subdued and a kindness received. Both happened, and the second took as many passages as the first.
The doubled salute in the first line is worth a last look. It is a small courteous noise, made twice, by a man walking home to his mother — and it is the last thing anybody does in this chapter before the road resumes.