Word went out to these great households that they should all prepare the five sacrificial beasts, flowers and fruit, and go to the shrine of the living to make offering and repay the kindness — of which no more.

A 生祠 is a shrine put up for someone who is still alive, and it was a real institution: grateful communities built them for popular officials, and unpopular ones sometimes built their own. Erecting one for a man who slipped away before dawn is a compliment with a slight chill to it.

The 五牲 are the five beasts of a full sacrifice. The list varies by ritual text, but the point is completeness rather than the exact menu — this is the largest offering the town knows how to make.

不題 — "of which no more" — is the storyteller's own sign-off, the narrator putting one thread down to pick up another. It appears at the close of a scene about a hundred and sixty times across the novel, and is a fossil of the days when this material was performed aloud.

We tell now how the Tang Monk and his three companions ate the wind and slept on the water, and had a peaceful road of it for something over half a month. Then one day they came in sight of a high mountain. The Tang Monk took fright again and said, "Disciples, those ridges ahead are steep and sheer. Do take care."

餐風宿水 — eating the wind, sleeping on the water — is a set four-word phrase for hard travelling, and the sort of expression Chinese still reaches for when someone has had a rough journey. It compresses weeks of discomfort into four characters.

又 — "again" — is the whole joke of the sentence. Tripitaka has taken fright at a mountain over and over since the journey began, and the narrator has stopped pretending otherwise.

Pilgrim laughed and said, "The road on this side is drawing near the land of Buddha. There is certainly no fiend or demon here. Set your heart at ease, Master, and do not fret." The Tang Monk said, "Disciple, although the Buddha-land is not far off, the temple monks said the other day that it is two thousand li down to the capital of India, and I still do not know how much road that is."

斷乎無甚妖邪 — "there is certainly no fiend or demon here" — is the single least reliable sentence Pilgrim speaks in the whole book, and the novel knows it. He says something like it whenever the country starts looking civilised, and it keeps not being true.

里 is the Chinese lǐ, a road-measure of a bit under six hundred metres in the Ming, so two thousand of them is something over eleven hundred kilometres. It is left in Chinese rather than converted because it names the Chinese unit itself, the way a recipe keeps its own measures.

國都 is the capital, and the 都 here is not the everyday word meaning "all" that fills the rest of this chapter — same character, different word.

Pilgrim said, "Master, it rather looks as though you have forgotten the Heart Scripture that the Crow's Nest Chan Master gave you."

The 心經 is the Heart Scripture — one of the shortest and by far the most recited text in East Asian Buddhism, about two hundred and sixty characters, ending in the mantra everyone knows. The Crow's Nest Chan Master handed it to Tripitaka far back in the journey, sitting in a nest in a tree.

Pilgrim is picking a fight, and he has chosen his ground carefully: the one text his master is proudest of. What follows is the best argument the two of them have anywhere in the journey, and the monkey wins it.