供出我們 He Must Be Selling Us Out
行者跳出路口，叫道：「師父，回來，回來。」八戒慌了道：「不好，不好，師兄供出我們來了。他身上又無錢財，包裡又無金銀，必定是叫師父要馬哩。叫我們是剝衣服了。」沙僧笑道：「二哥莫亂說。大哥是個了得的，向者那般毒魔狠怪，也能收服，怕這幾個毛賊？他那裡招呼，必有話說，快回去看看。」行者跳出路口，叫道：「师父，回来，回来。」八戒慌了道：「不好，不好，师兄供出我们来了。他身上又无钱财，包里又无金银，必定是叫师父要马哩。叫我们是剥衣服了。」沙僧笑道：「二哥莫乱说。大哥是个了得的，向者那般毒魔狠怪，也能收服，怕这几个毛贼？他那里招呼，必有话说，快回去看看。」
逐句解 Line by line
Monkey sprang out into the mouth of the road and called, "Master! Come back, come back!"
Fourteen characters and the joke sets itself up. From where the other three are standing, Monkey has just spent a long time talking privately to thirty armed men and is now shouting for his master to come back. They cannot see that the robbers are frozen. All they know is what it looks like.
Bajie panicked. "This is bad, this is bad. Our elder brother has given us up. He has no money on him and there is no gold or silver in the bundle, so he must be telling the master to hand over the horse. He'll be telling us to strip off our clothes next."
供出 — given us up. This is courtroom language: to state something under questioning, the word behind a written deposition. The chain reaches instead for the everyday word meaning to supply or provide, which is written identically and is a different word altogether. Pigsy is wrong about the facts and dead right about the vocabulary. Within a thousand characters the four of them will be extracting a real deposition from the real robbers, and within three thousand they will be standing in a court while somebody reads one out about them. His reasoning is also, in its way, sound. He works out that there is no money to hand over, therefore the horse must be next, therefore their clothes. He has simply started from the wrong premise and followed it faithfully all the way down.
Sha Monk laughed. "Second brother, stop talking nonsense. Our elder brother is a capable one. He has subdued poisonous demons and vicious monsters before now — is he going to be afraid of a few small-time thieves?"
了得的 — a capable one, one who can handle things. It is a stock compliment and the second character in it has gone weightless, the way endings do. 毛賊 — small-time thieves, literally hairy ones. Sha Monk is being dismissive on Monkey's behalf, and he is right to be. Sha Monk is the one who gets it. He almost always is: the quiet brother who says the sensible thing after Pigsy has said the panicked one. It is one of the steadiest running patterns in the whole book.
"He is calling us over there, so he must have something to say. Quick, go back and see."
那裡 — over there. This is the pointing word, not the asking one. In this edition the two are kept apart on the page, so a reader can tell at a glance that Sha Monk means over yonder and not where?. Most editions run the two together and leave you to work it out. 快回去看看 — quick, go back and have a look. The doubled verb at the end makes it casual: just go and see. Sha Monk has correctly concluded that nothing bad is happening.
Pigsy's panic is the funniest thing in the chapter and it is also the chapter's argument in miniature. He cannot see the robbers are frozen. He reasons from appearances to a confident, detailed, entirely wrong conclusion, and he reaches it in about fifteen seconds.
That is precisely what the widow did, what her sons did, and what the prefect is about to do. Every character in this chapter who gets something badly wrong gets it wrong the same way: by reasoning carefully from what they could see towards something they could not. The book puts the harmless version in Pigsy's mouth so that we recognise the shape of it when it turns up in a courtroom.
Sha Monk's answer is the corrective, and notice what it rests on. He does not have better information than Pigsy. He simply knows Monkey, and reasons from character instead of from appearances. Nobody in the Kou household or the prefecture has that option, because none of them has ever met the men they are accusing.