人有幾等人 There Are Ranks Among Men
三藏道：「我教你見了人打個問訊，不曾教你見王子就此歪纏。常言道：『物有幾等物，人有幾等人。』如何不分個貴賤？」三藏道：「我教你见了人打个问讯，不曾教你见王子就此歪缠。常言道：『物有几等物，人有几等人。』如何不分个贵贱？」
逐句解 Line by line
Tripitaka said, "I taught you to make a greeting when you meet a person. I did not teach you to carry on like that in front of a prince.
And here is the answer, and it turns on the same character again: 教 is jiāo in both halves, teaching, and Tripitaka hands Bajie's own word straight back to him twice. 歪纏 is to fool about, to make a nuisance of oneself — literally crooked-tangling. The distinction he is drawing is between a person and a prince, which is exactly the distinction he is about to make explicit.
As the common saying goes, "There are grades of things, and there are grades of men."
常言道, as the common saying has it, is the novel's cue for a proverb, and the proverb is quoted inside a second set of brackets so that even the punctuation shows it is borrowed. The saying itself is built as a matched pair with one character swapped: things have their grades, people have their grades. It is a thoroughly Confucian sentiment, arriving in the mouth of a Buddhist monk, in a chapter about whether faces can be judged.
How can you fail to distinguish high from low?"
貴賤, noble and base, is the pair that runs the whole social order — and Tripitaka is using it to say that a prince is owed a different bow from a farmer. It is worth holding that thought for the last third of the chapter, where three princes will kneel in the dust to three creatures the court has just called goblins.
Tripitaka wins the argument by drawing a distinction his disciple did not know existed: the greeting was right, the audience was wrong. It is a fair answer and a slightly chilling one.
The proverb he quotes is pure social hierarchy, and it sits oddly in the mouth of a man whose religion holds that all beings are equally capable of enlightenment. The novel does not point this out. It simply puts the sentence in the chapter and lets it sit there.
Hold on to the phrase about high and low. Before this chapter ends, the highest people in Yuhua will be face down on the ground in front of the lowest-looking, and nobody will remark on it.