Pilgrim had known it all along. He said to the Tang monk, "Master, say no more. This is those fellows Ānanda and Kāśyapa asking us for a present, and getting none, and so palming these white-paper books off on us."

⚠ 早已知之 — had known it all along. Monkey worked it out at some earlier point the book does not specify, and said nothing while his master wept and named his own execution. ⚠ 那廝 — those fellows, and it is contemptuous. He is using it of two of the Buddha's chief disciples, in earshot of nothing but his own party, about a mile from the hall. ⚠ And he is WRONG, or at least only half right. Dīpaṃkara said plainly, upstairs, that the wordless scriptures were real and the fault was in the readership. Monkey has the mechanism right and the meaning entirely upside down, and his explanation is the one everybody in the party accepts.

"Let us go straight back and lay a complaint before the Tathāgata, and charge them with extortion and collusion."

⚠ 掯財作弊 — squeezing money and working a fiddle. The first pair occurs twice in the novel, both here; the second is the ordinary word for collusion in a fraud and is still current. ⚠ 之罪 — the crime of. Monkey is not complaining, he is drafting a charge — and it is the second time in four hundred characters that somebody in this party has reached for the vocabulary of the criminal code. His master named his own offence; Monkey names theirs. This is the same instinct he showed at the treasure-loft: go over the head of the officer to the highest authority available.

Pigsy bawled, "Just so, just so — let us go and report them!"

⚠ 正是，正是 — quite right, quite right. Pigsy agrees with whoever spoke last, which is what Pigsy does, and doubles it. The party has now unanimously adopted the wrong explanation and is setting off to act on it. That the wrong explanation happens to produce exactly the right outcome is the joke the rest of the chapter is built on.

The four of them hurried back up the mountain with no good footing under them, and in all haste turned up towards Thunderclap again.

⚠ 回山無好步 — going back up the hill, and not a decent step among them. Five characters, and they carry the whole indignity: they came down this road in triumph an hour ago, bowing twice to everybody. ⚠ 急急 and 忙忙 — the doubled words again, twice in one short sentence. The chapter has used that device for houses, doors, years, birds and bamboo poles, and here it uses it for scrambling. And this is what Dīpaṃkara wanted. Make him come back and ask again.