"It is only that the fiends have real ability. Look you well to the horse and the baggage, and let old Monkey go up to heaven and fetch down some rescuing troops."

The plan, announced to a courtyard of village monks as though it were an errand. 求救兵 — to beg rescuing troops — is a phrase from the world of military dispatches, and he uses it about a trip he intends to make on foot through a gate in the sky.

The monks lost their nerve and said, "Your Honour can go up to heaven as well?"

Six characters, and the disbelief in them is the whole comedy of the scene. These are ordinary provincial monks. A man in their courtyard has just said he is going to heaven for reinforcements.

Pilgrim said with a laugh, "The Heavenly Palace was my old home."

舊家 — old home, the place I used to live. Delivered as a joke and meant literally, which is the way this character delivers most things.

"In the old days I was Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and because I threw the Peach Banquet into confusion I was taken in hand by our Buddha.

The novel's own opening seven chapters, in twenty characters. 齊天大聖 is the title he extorted from heaven; the 蟠桃會 is the Peach Banquet he wrecked in chapter 5, eating the immortality peaches and drinking the wine before the guests arrived. 收降 has 降 as xiáng, to subdue and take in — not the jiàng that means to come down. The same character will do both jobs within a few passages of here.

Now there is no help for it: I escort the Tang Monk to fetch the scriptures, setting merit against my crime, and along the road I uphold the right and clear away the wicked.

將功折罪 — take merit and use it to discount a crime — is a phrase out of the law courts, where a convicted man's later service could reduce his sentence. It is still in use. Pilgrim's entire pilgrimage is, in his own description of it, a sentence being served.

My master was due this trouble, and you would not know it."

該有此難 — he was due this calamity. The journey's disasters are scheduled; there are eighty-one of them and this is one. Pilgrim knows the schedule exists and the monks do not, and he says so without unkindness.

When the monks heard this they knocked their heads on the ground and bowed again.

They believed him. Six characters ago they could not credit that he might go to heaven; now they are prostrate.

Pilgrim got out of the door, gave a whistle, and in that instant was gone.

出得門 puts 得 between the verb and its object in the shape that means "managed to", and there the character takes the full dé — the opposite of the light one three passages back, and only the absence of 不 tells them apart. 唿哨 is a whistle through the fingers, the sound this character makes when he leaves in a hurry.