Bajie could hold it in no longer and shouted out: "Master, you are far too unwilling to fall in with people, and far too far from ordinary human feeling! The old squire's is a great house and enormously rich, he made this vow to feed monks and has only now completed it, and on top of that he keeps us here with perfect sincerity. We should stay a year or so — there would be no harm in it. Why must you keep on about going?"

⚠ Bajie has taken his host's side against his master, out loud, in front of the host. That has not happened before in this chapter and it is the moment the whole thing tips over. ⚠ And look at the number. Kou Hong asked for 月餘, a month or so. Bajie says 須住年把 — we ought to stay a year or thereabouts. He has multiplied his host's request by twelve while claiming to defend it. ⚠ 不近人情 — far from human feeling — is the charge, and it is the one accusation that lands. Everything Tripitaka has just said about deadlines and imperial commands is perfectly reasonable and completely cold. 留得至誠 hands the verb off to what the keeping was like: sincere. That is Bajie's whole case and it is not a bad one.

"You'd walk away from good food already cooked and go begging at other people's doors instead. Is there some grandpa or grandma of yours waiting for you up the road?"

⚠ The second half is a straightforward insult and a good one. He is asking whether Tripitaka has family up ahead — which of course he has not, since he is a monk and has no family anywhere — and the words he chooses are the homely ones a child would use. ⚠ It is also, buried in the rudeness, an argument. Begging for food is what the rule of their order requires and Bajie knows it. His point is that there is no virtue in refusing a meal that has already been cooked in order to go and ask for one somewhere else. On the merits he may even be right. But he has said it in a full room, to his master, in front of the man paying for everything.

The elder gave a bark of a shout: "You blockhead! All you know is your appetite. You care nothing for where the merit goes. You are exactly the beast that eats at the trough and scratches its itch inside its own belly."

⚠ 喝 here is the shout, not the word for drinking. The plain reading gives drinking, and the only frame that guards this character in the tables covers a different phrase entirely, so nothing would have caught it. The pairing used here — a barked syllable and then a shout — occurs twice in the whole novel. ⚠ 回向 is a real and precise term, and it is Tripitaka's actual objection. It means turning merit outwards — you perform something good and then formally direct the benefit of it somewhere else, to the dead, to all beings, to enlightenment. It is the mechanism that makes Kou Hong's ten thousand meals mean anything at all. ⚠ And the insult. 槽裡吃食，胃裡擦癢 — eats at the trough, scratches the itch inside its own stomach. It is a startling image and it is the exact opposite of turning merit outwards: a creature whose entire circuit of giving and receiving happens inside its own gut. Neither half of the phrase occurs anywhere else in the book.

"Since you are all set on craving this — greed, anger, folly — then tomorrow I shall go on by myself."

⚠⚠ 貪此嗔痴 is not abuse. Greed, anger and delusion are the three poisons, the standard Buddhist account of what keeps a being turning in the world, and Tripitaka has just named all three at his disciple in four characters. The phrase occurs once in the whole novel. ⚠ It is also unfair, and the unfairness is the point. Bajie wanted to stay somewhere comfortable — greed, at a stretch. Anger and delusion belong to whoever is doing the shouting. ⚠ 明日等我自家去罷 — tomorrow let me go on by myself. The last word is the light one, the little sound at the end of a sentence that makes it a suggestion rather than an order. It is the first of three in this chapter and every one of them is somebody giving up on an argument.