打不斷的親，罵不斷的鄰 The Quarrel You Cannot Break
唐僧與國王相別，至亭內，嗔責八戒道：「這夯貨，越發村了。這是甚麼去處，只管大呼小叫？倘或惱著國王，卻不被他傷害性命？」八戒道：「沒事，沒事。我們與他親家禮道的，他便不好生怪。常言道：『打不斷的親，罵不斷的鄰。』大家耍子，怕他怎的？」唐僧与国王相别，至亭内，嗔责八戒道：「这夯货，越发村了。这是甚么去处，只管大呼小叫？倘或恼着国王，却不被他伤害性命？」八戒道：「没事，没事。我们与他亲家礼道的，他便不好生怪。常言道：『打不断的亲，骂不断的邻。』大家耍子，怕他怎的？」
逐句解 Line by line
The Tang Monk took his leave of the king and came to the pavilion, where he told Eight Rules off: "You clumsy oaf, you get coarser and coarser. What sort of place do you think this is, that you keep bawling and shouting? Suppose you anger the king — will he not do us some harm?"
夯貨 is Tripitaka's favourite word for Eight Rules and it means roughly lump — the first character is the tamper you pound earth with. 惱著 is the one place in this chapter where the small word 著 is zháo: the anger does not just happen, it lands. Fourteen of the other uses are the zhe that shows an action going on, and six are the zhuó of a royal order. 甚麼 is read shèn me here, on the precedent of the sealed early chapters.
Eight Rules said, "It's nothing, it's nothing. We are on in-law terms with him and he can hardly take it badly.
The defence is the same one he used to get into the garden: we are family now, so the rules are relaxed. 親家 is a real and specific relationship: the parents of a married couple are one another's qìng jia, and Chinese has a word for it because the tie matters. The first character takes the departing tone in this sense and not the level one of ordinary closeness — all eight uses in the whole novel are the relationship, four of them in one scene of chapter 23 where Pilgrim proposes his master as the 男親家. Eight Rules is claiming the tie with a king whose daughter is marrying his master.
"As the common saying has it, 'A kinship you cannot beat apart, a neighbour you cannot curse away.' We are all enjoying ourselves — what is there to be afraid of?"
The last of the four citations the edition sets in its inner brackets, and the best of them. 打不斷的親，罵不斷的鄰 is two matched five-beat clauses, so it falls into verse however you read it aloud — and it takes no verse marking, because the test in this project is the printer's own bracket and not the shape of the line. What it says is true and rather warm: blood shouted at. Which makes it a strange thing to say about a marriage that is four days old and entirely fictitious.
Tripitaka has come off the high table where he was matching rhymes with a king, walked across a garden, and started telling his disciple off for making noise. The two halves of his position have finally met in one scene.
Eight Rules's argument is that they are family. It is a joke, but it is also the thing Tripitaka cannot bear to hear said out loud, because he has spent the afternoon behaving exactly as though it were true. The row that follows is not really about noise.
The proverb is worth keeping. It says that quarrelling cannot destroy some ties — which is exactly what the next passage shows, when Tripitaka has Eight Rules held down and beaten and nothing whatever changes between them.