Raising her eyes, she saw that the Tang monk's bearing was noble and his presence handsome and commanding. Then she turned and saw that the three with him were out of the ordinary altogether — and though she knew them for heavenly beings come down among men, she was frightened all the same, and knelt and bowed towards them.

⚠ The passage gives her two looks and puts a turn of the head between them. First Tripitaka, described in the vocabulary of a well-favoured gentleman; then the other three, and the sentence stops describing and simply says they were unlike anything. ⚠ 雖知他是天人下界，卻也有幾分悚懼 is the honest bit. She had worked out what they were before she came, she was right, and it did not help. Knowing something is a god does not stop the animal part of you from being afraid of its face. ⚠ 模樣 takes the everyday reading here, the one for what something looks like. The plain dictionary answer gives the word for a pattern or a mould instead, and this is the only site in the chapter.

Tripitaka hurried to return the courtesy: "You do me too much honour, bodhisattva." The old lady asked the squire, "If there are four teachers, why are they not sitting together?"

⚠ He calls her 菩薩 — bodhisattva. It is a courtesy, the polite form for a devout laywoman, and it is not empty flattery: it is the same word the novel uses for actual bodhisattvas, offered to a provincial housewife who has just knelt to three monsters. ⚠ 還禮 is the word for giving a courtesy back, and it needs a hand ruling here and again a hundred and eight characters later. The plain reading gives the ordinary adverb still or yet — a different word entirely, and one that makes nonsense of the sentence. ⚠ Her question is sharper than it sounds. She has looked at four monks arranged with one seated and three standing, and asked why. Nobody in the room has thought to explain the arrangement, because to everybody in it the arrangement is obvious.

Bajie stuck out his snout and said: "We three are the disciples." Oh! That one sound of his was like a tiger roaring in the deep hills, and the good lady was more frightened than ever.

⚠ This is the best-built joke in the chapter and it works on timing alone. She has asked a perfectly reasonable question. The answer is five characters long, entirely polite, entirely accurate, and it comes out of Bajie. ⚠ 噫 is a single character on its own — the narrator's intake of breath, dropped in between the speech and its effect. The novel uses it thirty-four times and once here, and its whole job is to make you wait one beat before the punchline. ⚠ And the punchline is that nobody minded what he said. 他這一聲 — that one sound of his. Not his words, not his snout, not his manners. The voice. He answered her courteously and terrified her by doing it. 掬著嘴 is a snout pushed out and cupped forward — the shape a pig makes when it speaks, and Bajie's characteristic gesture.