得一步就進一步 We Get One Step, We Take One Step
話表孫行者三人隨著宣召官至午門外，黃門官即時傳奏宣進。他三個齊齊站定，更不下拜。國王問道：「那三位是聖僧駙馬之高徒？姓甚名誰？何方居住？因甚事出家？取何經卷？」行者即近前，意欲上殿。傍有護駕的喝道：「不要走，有甚話，立下奏來。」行者笑道：「我們出家人，得一步就進一步。」隨後八戒、沙僧亦俱近前。话表孙行者三人随着宣召官至午门外，黄门官即时传奏宣进。他三个齐齐站定，更不下拜。国王问道：「那三位是圣僧驸马之高徒？姓甚名谁？何方居住？因甚事出家？取何经卷？」行者即近前，意欲上殿。傍有护驾的喝道：「不要走，有甚话，立下奏来。」行者笑道：「我们出家人，得一步就进一步。」随后八戒、沙僧亦俱近前。
逐句解 Line by line
The story goes that Pilgrim Sun and the other two followed the summoning officer out to the Meridian Gate, and the gate officer at once carried word in and announced them. The three of them planted themselves in a row and did not so much as bow.
The chapter opens on the word 話表, a storyteller's throat-clearing that means something like now the tale takes up. Chapter 93 opened on verse; this one opens on a man about to start talking. The last four words carry the whole scene: 更不下拜, and they did not even bow. Three monks are standing in a foreign king's audience hall — he summoned them by name — and they simply do not kneel. Everything that goes wrong in the next hundred words follows from those four words.
The king asked, "Those three are the eminent disciples of the holy monk, our Prince Consort? What are your names? Where do you live? What business drove you to leave home? What scriptures are you fetching?"
Four questions fired off without a pause, which is a king's privilege. 因甚事出家 is the standard question put to any monk: what made you leave the household life? The answer is meant to be short and pious. It is about to be neither. The 甚 here is the everyday what of Ming speech, and it turns up three times in this passage alone. 那三位 opens on those, not which — the king is confirming who he is looking at before he starts asking. Chapter 91 has the same phrase as a flat statement, 那三位是他高徒. Hold that: when he comes back for the second disciple he switches to the other reading of the same character, and asks.
Pilgrim stepped straight forward, meaning to go right up onto the dais. A guard at the king's side barked at him, "Stop there! If you have something to say, say it from where you stand."
A palace guard shouting down a guest is a small piece of stagecraft: it tells us where the invisible line across the floor is, so that we can enjoy Pilgrim walking over it. 喝 is hè, to bark or roar at somebody, not the hē of drinking. It is the standard word for an official raising his voice, and this project reads it that way throughout.
Pilgrim laughed and said, "We who have left home get one step, we take one step." Eight Rules and Sha Monk came forward right behind him.
This is the line the passage is named for, and it is a joke with a straight face on it. 得一步就進一步 sounds like a monk's saying about steady progress on the path — take what ground is given you. What Pilgrim actually means is: nobody has thrown me out yet, so I am moving up. The English idiom that lands closest is give him an inch, except that here the man taking the mile says it himself, cheerfully, to the king's face. And the last line shows it working: the other two shuffle up behind him, and the line across the floor has quietly moved.
Chapter 93 ended with Tripitaka betrothed to the princess of India, caught by a ball thrown from a tower he had been warned to walk past. This chapter opens the morning after, with his three disciples summoned to court so the king can look over the family he has acquired. It is, in form, a meeting of in-laws.
The comedy of the passage is entirely about furniture and floor space. A Chinese audience hall was a diagram of rank made out of architecture: who stands, who kneels, who may approach the dais, who sits. Pilgrim's method is not to argue with the diagram but to keep walking through it and see who stops him. First the bow he does not make, then the step he takes anyway, then the two disciples who follow him up. Nobody has said anything treasonous. The room has simply rearranged itself.
Worth holding on to: the king asks four polite questions expecting four short answers, and what he is going to get instead is three enormous set-piece autobiographies in matched prose, one after another, each grander than the last. He asked the wrong monkey.