積年假佛 A False Buddha of Many Years
說不了，見燈光昏暗，呼的一聲，把唐僧抱起，駕風而去。噫！不知是那山那洞真妖怪，積年假佛看金燈。諕得那八戒兩邊尋找，沙僧左右招呼。行者叫道：「兄弟，不須在此叫喚。師父樂極生悲，已被妖精攝去了。」那幾個和尚害怕道：「爺爺，怎見得是妖精攝去？」说不了，见灯光昏暗，呼的一声，把唐僧抱起，驾风而去。噫！不知是那山那洞真妖怪，积年假佛看金灯。諕得那八戒两边寻找，沙僧左右招呼。行者叫道：「兄弟，不须在此叫唤。师父乐极生悲，已被妖精摄去了。」那几个和尚害怕道：「爷爷，怎见得是妖精摄去？」
逐句解 Line by line
Before he had finished speaking, the lamplight dimmed, and with a rushing sound the Tang Monk was caught up and carried off upon the wind.
The abduction takes eighteen graphs and it happens between two clauses. 說不了 — he had not finished the sentence. Pilgrim's warning and the loss of his master occupy the same breath.
Alas!
One graph, on its own line. 噫 is the narrator sighing over the reader's shoulder — the same interjection this novel uses at its biggest hinges. The edition keeps it as its own unit because that is how the source sets it.
There was no knowing from what mountain or what cave the true demons came, who year after year had counterfeited buddhas and watched the golden lamps.
The narrator says outright what the town has never worked out, and the phrase is the passage's title: 積年假佛, counterfeiting buddhas for years on end. Two readings: both instances of 那 are nǎ, the interrogative "which" — chapter 4 has the same construction at 不知那個剛強那個柔 — and not the nà of pointing at something.
Eight Rules was so alarmed that he searched to either side, and Sha the Monk called out left and right.
Two disciples doing the useless thing, in parallel clauses. They are looking for a man who is already miles away, because looking is what there is to do.
Pilgrim called, "Brothers, there is no need to stand here shouting.
And Pilgrim, characteristically, stops them. He is the only one who understood what happened while it was happening, and the only one not wasting time.
"When joy reaches its height, sorrow is born. Master has been carried off by demons."
樂極生悲 is a proverb still in daily use — when pleasure peaks, grief follows. Pilgrim produces it as a diagnosis rather than a consolation, and it is also, precisely, the argument of the poem that opened this chapter: pause a moment, rest a moment, and you fall.
Those few monks said in terror, "Grandfather! How can you tell demons carried him off?"
The third time in this chapter somebody has asked how a thing can be known — Pilgrim on the oil, Tripitaka on the wind, and now the monks on the abduction. This time the answer is going to hold.
The abduction is over before the sentence Pilgrim started is finished, and the novel does not linger. What it does instead is stop and tell you, in the narrator's own voice, the thing nobody in Jinping has managed to work out in living memory: 積年假佛看金燈 — for years on end they have counterfeited buddhas and watched the golden lamps.
Notice how little the reader has been kept in the dark. The oil shops were in the first list of trades; the arithmetic was laid out in full; Pig said out loud that the Buddhas must be taking the oil. The chapter's suspense has never been about what is happening. It has been about watching a whole town, and then a holy man, fail to see something that was in front of them the entire time.
Pilgrim's diagnosis is a proverb — 樂極生悲, when joy peaks, grief is born — and it lands as the chapter's own verdict on itself. The opening lyric said it in the register of inner alchemy: bind the horse, bind the ape, do not pause. Pilgrim says it in the register of something you would hear in a market. They are the same sentence, and the chapter has spent twenty-three hundred graphs demonstrating it with a festival.