各國的寶印 The Seals of Every Kingdom
又打開袋內關文一看，見有各國的寶印花押，道：「早是我來看呀，不然，你們都撞出事來了。這和尚不是強盜，切莫動他衣物。待明日太爺再審，方知端的。」眾禁子聽言，將包袱還與他，照舊包裹，交與獄官收訖。又打开袋内关文一看，见有各国的宝印花押，道：「早是我来看呀，不然，你们都撞出事来了。这和尚不是强盗，切莫动他衣物。待明日太爷再审，方知端的。」众禁子听言，将包袱还与他，照旧包裹，交与狱官收讫。
逐句解 Line by line
Then he opened the travel warrant inside the satchel and took one look, and saw the treasure-seals and signatures of every kingdom on it. "It is as well I came," he said. "Otherwise you would all have brought trouble down on yourselves."
各國的寶印花押 — the treasure-seals and signatures of every kingdom. This is what the document is: not a description of the bearer but a chain of endorsements, one court after another, each having examined him and let him pass. And it proves the case in a single glance. Tripitaka offered it to the prefect in open court and was told he was talking his way round things. A prison officer doing an inventory opens it and the whole prosecution collapses. 早是我來 — it is as well I came. He is not congratulating himself on justice. He is telling his men how close they came to robbing somebody they could not afford to rob.
"These monks are no robbers. On no account touch their belongings. Wait till his honour examines them again tomorrow, and then we shall know the truth of it."
端的 — the truth of it, the real state of things. An early vernacular word, and its second character takes a reading of its own here rather than the weightless one it carries everywhere else. 這和尚不是強盜 — these monks are no robbers. Said flatly, by the first person in the chapter to look at the evidence rather than the circumstances. He does not release them, and he could not. He is a prison officer and the case belongs to the prefect. All he can do is stop the theft and wait for the morning — which is, in the event, exactly enough.
The turnkeys heard him, gave the bundles back, wrapped them up as before, and handed them over to the warden for safekeeping.
還與他 — gave them back to him. The first of those two characters is the give-back word, not the everyday one meaning still or yet that this chapter uses thirteen other times. No rule can ever settle this pair: the two run together often, and at six of the ten places it occurs in the novel the first character is the other word entirely. 收訖 — received and closed. A clerk's word, the formula written at the foot of a receipt. The cassock is back in its oiled paper and logged into the prison store. The pilgrims are still in the frame, still charged with murder, and still due to be tortured in the morning — but nobody is going to steal from them.
The travel warrant does its work at last, and it does it in the wrong room. Tripitaka produced it in open court and the prefect never looked. A prison officer opens it while listing confiscated property, reads it in one glance, and knows immediately that the men in his cells are not robbers.
What convinces him is not the text but the seals. A chain of endorsements from kingdom after kingdom is something no thief could forge and no thief would carry. The document is not evidence about the crime at all — it is evidence about who these men are, and that turns out to be the only thing anybody needed to know.
And it changes nothing, immediately. He has no power to release them; the case is the prefect's. The pilgrims spend the night in the restraining frames with a murder charge over them, having been saved from robbery but not from anything else. What the warden has actually bought them is one night — and Monkey is about to use it.