Bajie could not keep his mouth shut and said to the Tang monk again: "Master, don't stand so much on your dignity. As the saying goes, if they will keep you, be kept — go, and you'll be thought ill of. Let us stay a month, settle the wish of the mother and the sons, and that will do. Why keep on being in such a hurry?"

⚠ 留得在，落得怪 is a proverb and it occurs once in the whole novel, which means there is no second site to check the sense against. It sets two outcomes side by side — being kept, and being resented — and leaves the reader to supply the connection. ⚠ In Bajie's mouth the argument is plain enough: take the hospitality while it is offered, because refusing it gives offence. He has just watched the mistress of the house walk out in a temper, so the evidence is on his side. ⚠ 也罷了 keeps the full reading here, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. The little word looks like the light one that closes a sentence with a shrug, and this project weighed making it so and did not: every one of the two hundred-odd places in the novel where these two characters stand together takes the full reading, and both standard dictionaries agree. Ruling otherwise here would have made this the only chapter in the book that says it differently.

The Tang monk gave another bark, and the idiot slapped himself twice across the mouth: "Pah! Pah! Pah! I was told not to talk so much, and I've gone and made a noise again!" Wukong and Shaseng stood to one side sniggering.

⚠ He hits himself. Nobody tells him to — his master barks once and Bajie administers his own two slaps and his own reprimand out loud. It is the funniest thing in the chapter and it is also rather sad. 啐 is a spitting noise of self-disgust, three of them in a row. And 赥赥 is the sound of two people trying not to laugh where they can be seen — a rare word, four times in the whole novel, and every one of them is somebody sniggering at somebody else's trouble.

The Tang monk turned on Wukong: "What are you laughing at?" — and made the finger sign, about to recite the headband spell. In a fright Wukong went down on his knees: "Master, I wasn't laughing, I wasn't laughing. Whatever you do, don't recite it — don't recite it."

⚠ 緊箍兒咒 is the tightening-band spell — the golden circlet fixed on Wukong's head at the start of the journey, which contracts and gives him agonising headaches whenever Tripitaka says the words. It is the only hold his master has over him and the novel names it twenty-six times. ⚠ 即捻訣 — he made the finger sign. Tripitaka does not even have to speak. The gesture that precedes the spell is enough, and Wukong is on the floor before a syllable is out. ⚠ Consider what is happening. The being who fought the armies of heaven, who has killed more demons than anyone can count, is kneeling and denying that he laughed. The whole scene is about a snigger, and it is the third time in four hundred characters that this quarrel has escalated over nothing at all.