Bajie could not hold himself in. He thrust out his snout and said, "And have you ever seen the monk who tamed the Pig King?"

Bajie cannot resist and makes the joke worse by taking it seriously. 曾 is céng here, the marker of past experience — have you ever — and the base reading sends it to zēng, a family name, which is wrong. The retort is a boast disguised as a question: he is not denying he is a pig, he is upgrading himself to a king and daring them to name the monk who managed it.

It so terrified the people all down the street that they went stumbling and staggering, and dodged away to either side.

Two rarities in one clause. 諕 is xià, to frighten — an old way of writing the ordinary modern character for scaring someone, and it appears five times in this chapter. Then the staggering itself is written with a doubled character so rare it is missing from most fonts; the whole four-character run means to go tripping and reeling. The novel writes this same stumbling four different ways in four different places, each with its own pair of characters and its own sound, and this spelling of it occurs here and nowhere else in the book.

Pilgrim laughed and said, "Idiot, put that snout away. Stop showing off — mind your feet, we are crossing the bridge."

藏 is cáng here, to hide — one of only three times in the chapter the character is not part of Tripitaka's name, where it is read the other way. 裝扮 is to dress up or play a part, so Pilgrim is accusing Bajie of putting on a performance. 仔 is zǐ in 仔細, careful — and the tail of the line is pure elder brother: stop clowning and watch your step.