The elder heard him, turned his horse gladly, came back to the roadside and called, "Wukong, what is it you have called us back for?" Monkey said, "Come and look at what these robbers have to say."

欣然 — gladly. Tripitaka has spent the whole hold-up shaking on his horse, and one shout from Monkey settles him completely. 看這些賊是怎的說 — look at what these robbers have to say. It is an invitation to a joke, and Monkey delivers it deadpan. The robbers are going to say nothing at all.

Bajie went up and gave one a shove, calling, "Robber! How come you have stopped moving?" The robbers were utterly senseless, and neither spoke nor made a sound.

⚠ 動彈 — to budge, to stir. The second character has gone weightless, the way it does at the end of a word. Read at full weight it means a pellet or a bullet, which is what a dictionary gives you and which makes nonsense of a man standing still. The word appears exactly once in the whole novel, so there is nothing else to check it against. 推著他 — giving him a shove. Bajie's instinct is to poke it and see, and that is exactly the right instinct here.

Bajie said, "They've gone nicely dumb." Monkey said with a laugh, "Old Monkey used the body-fixing method on them, that's all."

好的痴啞了 — gone nicely dumb. Bajie is enjoying himself. The little word in the middle is doing the same work as nicely in English: appreciative, faintly gloating. Monkey's answer is offhand to the point of rudeness — he has frozen thirty armed men and describes it as a thing he did, that's all.

Bajie said, "You've fixed their bodies, but you never fixed their mouths. How is it they can't make a sound either?"

A genuinely good question, and it is Bajie who asks it. He has understood the spell well enough to spot that it has overreached its own name. This is one of the running pleasures of the book: Bajie is stupid about people and consistently sharp about mechanics. He panicked five minutes ago over nothing, and now he is the only one paying attention to how the magic actually works.

Monkey said, "Master, get down off the horse and take a seat."

坐著 — sit yourself down and stay there. The character after the verb marks something that continues rather than something done once, so it is settle down rather than sit. The staging matters. Monkey seats Tripitaka before anything else happens, and what follows is a court: a seated presiding figure, three officers with weapons, and thirty defendants on the ground.