Bajie said, "You're hopeless, quite hopeless. I shall eat my fill at this one sitting, and then I shan't be hungry for three days." Wukong heard him and said, "Idiot — don't burst your belly. We're supposed to be walking today."

Bajie's answer to the proverb about not being able to hoard a meal is to try to hoard one anyway. Three days on a single sitting, he reckons — and the reckoning is the same one he applies to everything, which is that if you take enough of a good thing now it will still be there later. 肚 takes the reading for a belly rather than the one for tripe on a plate — a distinction the plain reading gets wrong, and the only site in the chapter. The three of them have now had this exchange twice in one banquet. Bajie proposes eating, Shaseng makes a joke about it, Wukong tells him he will burst. Nobody is listening to anybody.

Before they had finished, the sun was near the middle of the sky. The elder at the head of the table raised his chopsticks and recited the Grace at Meat.

謁齋經 is the grace said over a monastic meal, and this is the last of the chapter's four titles marked with their own brackets. Chapter 95 had none at all and asserted the zero rather than dropping the handling; four live sites here are what that discipline bought. And notice what the grace means to the man at the other end of the table. A meal has a beginning and an end, and the elder has just said the words that start it — which, for Bajie, means the clock has started.

Bajie panicked. He grabbed the rice that was being brought round, a bowl to a mouthful, and got through another five or six bowls; then he took the buns, the steamed cakes, the flat cakes and the roast pastries, and without caring which was which crammed both his sleeves absolutely full — and only then got up to follow his master.

八戒慌了 — Bajie panicked. Two characters of pure comedy, and the timing is exact: the grace is said, the meal is formally beginning and therefore formally ending, and he understands at once that this is his last chance. 沒好沒歹的滿滿籠了兩袖 — not caring what was good or bad, he filled both sleeves right up. The phrase occurs once in the whole novel and so does the sleeve-filling. Wide sleeves were where a Ming traveller carried things, so this is not clownishness for its own sake; it is what the garment was for, used past all decency. The second of the chapter's two rare food characters is in this list, in 𩜇兒 — a steamed cake. Both of its appearances are things to eat, and this is the last of them. And the last four characters undercut everything: 才跟師父起身. Only then did he get up and follow. Shaseng was right that there is no such thing as a private stomach, and Bajie has found the loophole — sleeves.