As they went they saw a tiger-crouch gatehouse; inside the gate, hanging on the screen wall, was a great board with four characters written on it: Ten Thousand Monks Not Turned Away.

影壁 is the screen wall — a free-standing panel set a few paces inside a gateway so that nobody in the street can see straight into the courtyard. It has a practical job and a second one: a house was believed to be safer if bad influences, which were held to travel in straight lines, met a wall on the way in. So think about where Kou Hong has hung his sign. Not on the street front, where it would be an advertisement. On the screen wall, where you can only read it once you have already stepped through his gate. It is the difference between a notice and a welcome. And here the four characters appear for the third and last time, now in the narrator's own voice with the plain outer brackets — the same words that the old man wrapped one way and Tripitaka wrapped the other.

Tripitaka said, "This is Buddha ground, here in the west. Wise or foolish, there is no deceit in any of them. When the two old men told me I still did not quite believe it, and now here it is, exactly as they said."

He admits he doubted them. That is a small and rather lovely piece of characterisation: a man whose entire journey rests on faith, standing in front of a wooden board and confessing that he had not quite credited two strangers on a bench. 賢者愚者，俱無詐偽 — wise and foolish alike, no deceit in them — is him over-generalising wildly from one sign, which is also in character. The chapter will not contradict him. Nobody in Diling county lies to anybody in this chapter; the trouble, when it comes, comes from people being too generous rather than too crooked.

Bajie, being a boor, was for going straight in. Wukong said, "Hold on, idiot. Wait till somebody comes out and asks us what we want — then we can go in properly."

村野 is a flat little word meaning rustic, unpolished, the manners of somebody from a village. The narrator applies it to Bajie without comment, as a fact about him. And then the genuinely funny part. The one insisting on correct form here is Wukong — the disciple who in the first seven chapters of this book ate the peaches of immortality, drank the elixir, wrecked a banquet in heaven and fought the entire celestial army. He is now explaining doorstep etiquette to a pig. It is not a joke the novel underlines, and it is one of the ways it shows that fourteen years on the road have changed him. Nobody says he has improved. He simply behaves better, in a passage about nothing at all.

Shaseng said, "Big brother is right. If we push in without knowing what is inside and what is out, we shall only vex our host." They set the horse and the baggage down at the gate.

不分內外 — not telling inside from outside — is more specific than it looks. A house of this sort is divided: the outer rooms where guests are received and business is done, and the inner ones where the family lives and the women of the household are. Walking past that line uninvited is the exact rudeness Shaseng is warning against. Hold onto it, because the chapter is going to walk right up to that line on purpose. Kou Hong's wife and his two sons will both come out to the front rooms to look at the visitors, and the squire will send them back inside before the men sit down to eat. The household's inner boundary is one of the things Chapter 96 is quietly interested in. 說得有理 takes the light reading, handing the verb off to the verdict — the plain dictionary answer gives the full one, as it does at nine sites in this chapter. Shaseng is named seven times in Chapter 96 and speaks four of those times; this is the only one where he backs his elder brother outright, and it settles the matter in a sentence.