Then he flew into the Kou house, and saw that the coffin was already standing in the main room, with a lamp burning at the head of it and incense, candles, flowers and fruit set out; the old wife was weeping at his side.

Three verbs in a row, each with the light character after it — 停著棺材, 點著燈, 擺列著 — and every one marks a state rather than an act. The book is not telling us that somebody set the coffin down and lit a lamp; it is showing us the room as Monkey finds it, everything already in place. 在傍 — at his side. The second character is the beside reading, which the tables hold and the chain has never given it. 材頭 — the head of the coffin, where the lamp goes. The book uses the plain word for timber rather than the full word for a coffin, which is what a household would say.

He also saw his two sons come to bow and weep, and the two daughters-in-law carrying two bowls of rice to set before him.

供獻 — to set before him as an offering. The offering reading again, and the fifth of this chapter's six uses of that character to come out wrong; only the one inside the word for feeding monks is right, and only because the tables hold it. The whole family is here doing the correct things in the correct order — coffin, lamp, incense, offerings, the sons bowing, the wives bringing food. The mourning is entirely proper. It is also, as the reader knows and they do not, built on a murder charge against four innocent men.

Monkey settled on the head of the coffin and gave a cough. It frightened the two daughters-in-law into running out with their hands and feet all anyhow;

咳嗽了一聲 — gave a cough. One cough, in a room where a dead man is lying, at three in the morning. It is the best-judged special effect in the novel and it costs nothing. 諕得 — frightened into. The chapter's fourth use of this frightening word, and the tables settle its reading. The brief for this chapter listed the word as absent; it turns up six times over. 查手舞腳 — hands and feet all anyhow. The word appears exactly once in the whole novel and its first character is not the one this book normally uses for a gesture of the hands — that one turns up earlier in this very chapter, in the formal salute Monkey made to the robbers, and means almost the opposite. The reading given here is the character's own; the oddity is left standing rather than tidied away.

and Kou Liang and his brother lay flat on the ground and dared not stir.

This clause ends on a full stop that is not the usual one. The edition sets a narrow Western-style point here instead of the round mark it uses everywhere else, once in the whole chapter, and it is kept as printed. 伏在地下不敢動 — lay flat and dared not stir. The sons' response is to get down and stay down. Their wives ran; they prostrate themselves. Both are what you do when the dead speak.