Wukong said, "This idiot will not think a thing through. I have been over this road a few times, true — but I was up in the ninth heaven then. I came by cloud and I went by cloud. When did I ever set foot down here?"

The retort is also a piece of information, and a good one. Wukong has covered this ground before, in the years when he could cross the whole distance in a single leap, and it did him no good at all: he was too high up to see any of it. That is quietly one of the novel's own arguments about itself. The journey has to be walked. Wukong could carry Tripitaka to the mountain in an afternoon and everybody knows it, and the ground still has to go under somebody's feet before it counts as travelled. 何曾 is céng, the word for ever having done a thing. The plain chain reads it as the surname instead, at this one site out of four in the chapter — the three plain 不曾 come out right without help. It is a good example of how these errors arrive: not in the hard places, but in the one spot where the surrounding words happen to look different.

"It was no concern of mine, so why would I have looked into it? That is why I don't know. And what's odd about that? Where am I having you on?"

Read what he throws back. Bajie accused him of two things in the passage before — of something being 蹺蹊, off, and of 捉弄, playing a trick — and Wukong closes his speech by handing back both words, in order, unchanged. That is not a coincidence of vocabulary; it is how an argument between these two sounds. Wukong does not usually answer Bajie's charges. He repeats them until they sound as silly as he thinks they are. 事不關心 — a thing that does not touch your heart — is the middle of his case, and it is oddly bleak for a joke. He did not look because he did not care. The novel will spend the rest of this chapter among people who care enormously about a thing that does not touch them either.