一陣暗風 A Gust of Dark Wind
國王見他們拜佛心重，苦留不住，遂取金銀二百錠、寶貝各一盤奉謝。師徒們一毫不受。教擺鑾駕，請老師父登輦，差官遠送。那后妃并臣民人等俱各叩謝不盡。及至前途，又見眾僧叩送，俱不忍相別。行者見送者不肯回去，無已，捻訣，往巽地上吹口仙氣，一陣暗風，把送的人都迷了眼目，方才得脫身而去。這正是：国王见他们拜佛心重，苦留不住，遂取金银二百锭、宝贝各一盘奉谢。师徒们一毫不受。教摆銮驾，请老师父登辇，差官远送。那后妃并臣民人等俱各叩谢不尽。及至前途，又见众僧叩送，俱不忍相别。行者见送者不肯回去，无已，捻诀，往巽地上吹口仙气，一阵暗风，把送的人都迷了眼目，方才得脱身而去。这正是：
畢竟不知前路如何，且聽下回分解。毕竟不知前路如何，且听下回分解。
逐句解 Line by line
The king, seeing how set their hearts were on worshipping the Buddha and that there was no keeping them however he pressed, took two hundred ingots of gold and silver and a tray each of precious things and offered them in thanks. Master and disciples would not take a hair of it.
The refusal is flat and complete, and it is the book's standing test of a pilgrim. 重 in 心重 is zhòng, weight — their hearts are set heavily on it. It is the opposite reading to the chóng of doing something again that the chapter used twice in the last hundred characters, and the chain gets this one right. 一毫不受 — would not take a hair — is the standard phrase for refusing absolutely. They have just accepted six days of banquets, so the line is drawn at portable wealth rather than at hospitality.
He ordered the imperial equipage drawn up and invited the old master to mount the carriage, and detailed officers to escort them a long way. The consorts and the ministers and the people all bowed their thanks without ceasing.
不盡 — without ceasing — carries the small tone shift that has been a known defect in this project's machinery for a long time: the 不 must rise before a departing tone, and the machinery used to settle it before the reading tables had finished moving, so it never saw the tone it should react to. A hundred and two sites in sixty-five chapters, and this is one of them. It is fixed as of this chapter. 鑾駕 is the imperial equipage with its bell-hung carriage. A foreign king is sending a Chinese monk on his way in the vehicle reserved for himself.
And when they had gone some way along the road they saw the monks bowing them off as well, and none of them could bear to part. Pilgrim, seeing that those seeing them off would not turn back, had no help for it: he made the finger sign, blew a breath of immortal air towards the xun quarter, and a gust of dark wind blinded the eyes of all the people who were seeing them off, so that at last they got away.
The last magic in the chapter is used to escape being thanked. 巽 is one of the eight trigrams and its element is wind, so blowing towards the xun quarter is the technically correct way to raise one. The book is consistent about this: Wukong's wind always goes that way. 暗風 — a dark wind — does no harm at all. It fills people's eyes for a moment, and when they can see again there is nobody there. It is the gentlest spell he casts in the entire chapter.
This is the very thing:
The chapter's last cue, three characters, handing over to the closing couplet.
Washed clean in the waves of grace, he has come back to the perfected nature; / out of the golden sea, he wakes to the true emptiness.
The closing couplet, and it reads the whole chapter as a lesson rather than an adventure. 了 here is liǎo, to complete or perfect — not the light marker of a finished action, which is what it is at fifty-five of the chapter's fifty-seven sites. 了性 is the technical pair of perfecting the nature, which in inner alchemy goes with perfecting the life-force. 金海 — the golden sea — is the sea of gold, wealth and worldly attachment, and 真空 is true emptiness, the Buddhist term for seeing that things have no fixed self. The couplet says the pilgrims left the gold on the table and walked out.
In the end there is no knowing what the road ahead held; and for that you must listen to the next chapter's telling.
The storyteller's sign-off, unchanged for a hundred chapters. It is the oldest thing in the book — the professional close of a man who told this material aloud, in instalments, to people who would come back tomorrow. The written novel keeps it at the end of every chapter, and it is the last sentence a reader of this chapter meets.
The pilgrims leave by making themselves unfindable, and the detail is the last good one in the chapter. They refuse two hundred ingots of gold and silver, they are put in the king's own carriage, they are escorted for miles, and they still cannot get away from people who want to thank them. So Wukong blows a wind into everybody's eyes and they walk off while nobody is looking.
It is the gentlest thing he does all chapter, and it is aimed at gratitude. Every other spell here has been a weapon or a threat — a thousand rods, a shout at the gate of Heaven, a rock levered off a burrow. The last one is a courtesy, and the only harm it does is a moment of grit.
The closing couplet then tells you what the chapter thought it was doing. Washed clean in the waves of grace, returned to the perfected nature; out of the golden sea, awake to true emptiness. The gold on the table and the true nature recovered are the same two lines, and the second follows from the first.
And after all that, six characters of shopfront patter: there is no knowing what came next, so come back tomorrow. This book has never once forgotten that somebody used to say it out loud for money.