The four of them came ashore and looked back — and the bottomless boat was not to be seen at all.

⚠ 卻不知去向 — no telling where it had gone. The boat that carried them out of their own bodies is simply not there when they turn round. The book does not describe it going. It describes them looking, and finding nothing, which is a different and better effect. A vessel with no bottom in it leaves no wake either. 上岸回頭 — ashore and looking back. The first thing anybody does on the far shore is check behind them.

Only then did Monkey say that it had been the Buddha Who Receives and Leads.

⚠ 方說 — only then did he say. Monkey has been sitting on this for six hundred characters. He knew at first sight, hailed a buddha like a ferryman, watched his master complain about the state of the boat, and said nothing until the boat had gone. His timing is not modesty. Telling them earlier would have made the crossing a ceremony, and a man who is about to be pushed into a river is easier to push if he is not being reverent.

Only then did Tripitaka understand; and he turned about in haste and thanked his three disciples instead.

⚠ 反謝了三個徒弟 — thanked his three disciples INSTEAD. The first character reverses the direction: he had been about to thank the buddha, the buddha has gone, so he turns round and thanks the three who are still there. ⚠ 方才省悟 — only then did it dawn on him. The same four characters the book used of him at the abbey gate, two thousand characters back, when he had to be told who the Great Immortal was. Nothing about crossing has made him quicker.

Monkey said, "Neither of us thanks the other. We have held each other up, and that is all."

⚠ 兩不相謝 — neither thanks the other. Four characters, and they are the closest thing to a summary of the whole relationship that Monkey ever produces. ⚠ 彼此皆扶持 — each of us has propped the other up. 扶持 is a physical word, the sort used of a stick or a hand under an elbow, and it is exactly what he did to his master eight hundred characters ago, if you count a shove. He refuses the thanks and then explains why in two clauses, one for each direction. It is the only speech in the chapter with a structure like an argument.

"It is thanks to our master that we were released; we borrowed his road to work our merit, and by good fortune we have won the true fruit."

⚠ 借門路修功 — borrowed a road to work merit on. That is a startlingly plain admission: the pilgrimage was the master's errand, and the three of them used it to get their own sentences commuted. 虧師父解脫 — released thanks to the master. All three were serving punishments when he found them — under a mountain, in a river, in a pigsty — and none of them would be here otherwise. ⚠ 正果 — the true fruit, the goal of the whole practice. Monkey said the same word at the bridge, where he made it a condition of crossing. Now he says it as a thing already got.

"And our master depended on our protection, and on holding to the teaching and its sustaining power, and so has gladly shed his mortal frame."

⚠ 秉教伽持 — holding to the teaching and its sustaining power. The last two characters are the edition's spelling of a Buddhist term for the power a buddha lends to somebody who needs it. Read them as the word rather than as the graphs: the first is standing in for a different character with the same sound. ⚠ The whole two-graph run occurs once in the novel — and Chapter 84's own heading is built on the same word, so it is house vocabulary even though this is the only time the story says it. ⚠ 喜脫了凡胎 — gladly shed the mortal frame. This is the chapter naming what came down the river. The body in the water was 凡胎, the flesh a person is born in, and the novel uses that word twenty-six times in twenty-four chapters, always of something to be got out of.

"Master — look at this fine country in front of you, the flowers and grass and pine and bamboo, the phoenixes and cranes and deer. Set it beside the places where fiends showed themselves. Which is the fair one and which the foul?"

⚠ 孰美孰惡 — which fair, which foul. Monkey ends his one reflective speech of the chapter by asking his master to compare two landscapes, and it is a rhetorical question with a real edge in it. ⚠ 妖邪顯化之處 — the places where fiends manifested. That is ninety chapters of this book in five characters, dismissed as scenery of the wrong sort. 松篁 — pine and bamboo. The second character means specifically a bamboo grove, and it occurs once in the novel.

"Which the good and which the fearful?"

Four characters, doubling the question he has just asked. Monkey does not often say a thing twice, and when he does it is because he wants an answer. ⚠ 兇 here is not wickedness so much as danger — the word for a place where something bad happens to you. He is asking his master to agree that the road is over.

Tripitaka thanked them again and again.

⚠ Six characters, and they do not answer the question. Monkey asked which landscape was fair and which foul, twice; Tripitaka goes on thanking him. 不已 — without stopping. The book has used this construction of him before and it always means the same thing: he has nothing to say and is saying it politely.