Before long they were outside the mountain gate, and everyone there put their hands together and greeted them, laughing. "Has the holy monk come to change the scriptures?"

⚠⚠ 聖僧是換經來的 — come to CHANGE the scriptures. And they are laughing. The gatekeepers know exactly what has happened, they know why the pilgrims are back, and they find it funny. ⚠ The verb is the plain one for exchanging goods — the word you would use at a shop counter. Nobody at this gate treats the wordless canon as a scandal. They treat it as a return. ⚠ 拱手相迎 — greeting one another with clasped hands. The middle character is xiāng, mutually, and the ordinary chain of readings gives the other reading at both of this phrase's two sites in the novel.

Tripitaka nodded and thanked them.

Six characters, and no reply to the question. He has just been asked, cheerfully, whether he has come to swap his scriptures, and he nods. There is nothing else he can say. The gate staff have understood his situation better than he has.

The vajra-guardians did not block the way either, but let them through, straight to the front of the Great Hero Hall.

⚠ 也不阻擋 — did not block them either. And there is the difference from the first visit, in four characters. Coming up this road the first time they were stopped at the gate, made to wait, and announced through three separate posts before a decree summoned them in. ⚠ This time nobody stops them at all. They walk straight to the hall. The whole apparatus of protocol that took a hundred and thirty characters to get through has simply been set aside — which tells you that everyone in the building was expecting this.

Pilgrim bawled out, "Tathāgata! Master and disciples have taken ten thousand stings and a thousand fiends, a thousand bitternesses and ten thousand hardships, and have bowed our way here from the Land of the East. You gave orders that the scriptures were to be handed over, and Ānanda and Kāśyapa, failing to squeeze money out of us, colluded together and deliberately gave us wordless white-paper books to carry away."

⚠ 行者嚷道 — Pilgrim BAWLED. He is shouting at the Buddha, to his face, in his own hall, in front of the assembled orders. ⚠ 萬蜇千魔 — ten thousand stings and a thousand fiends. The phrase occurs once in the whole novel. He has built it to rhyme with the standard four-character phrase for hardship that follows it, and the two together are a hundred chapters in eight characters. ⚠ And notice the structure of the complaint: YOU gave the order, THEY obstructed it. Monkey is not accusing the Buddha; he is telling him his staff have gone against his instructions. That is how you complain upwards in any bureaucracy, and it is exactly right.

"What use is it for us to carry them off?"

Seven characters, and it is his master's own line handed back. Tripitaka asked exactly this on the road, of empty books with no words in them. Monkey has taken the complaint, put it into the register of a formal charge, and kept his master's question inside it word for word.

"I beg the Tathāgata to issue a ruling."

⚠ 敕治 — to punish by imperial decree. It is the exact word for a sovereign disciplining an official, and Monkey uses it of a buddha disciplining two saints. ⚠ 望 — I look up and beg. The petition formula, the same one Tripitaka used when he asked to be sent home. Monkey has shouted his way through the whole speech and lands on a perfectly correct closing courtesy. He came in bawling and finished by filing properly. The Buddha's answer is the next thing in the chapter.