昨日襤褸 Yesterday in Rags
次早，唐僧換了衣服，披上錦襴袈裟，戴了毘盧帽，手持錫杖，登堂拜辭大仙。大仙笑道：「昨日襤褸，今日鮮明，睹此相，真佛子也。」三藏拜別就行。大仙道：「且住，等我送你。」次早，唐僧换了衣服，披上锦襕袈裟，戴了毘卢帽，手持锡杖，登堂拜辞大仙。大仙笑道：「昨日褴褛，今日鲜明，睹此相，真佛子也。」三藏拜别就行。大仙道：「且住，等我送你。」
逐句解 Line by line
Next morning the Tang monk changed his clothes, put on the brocade cassock, set the Vairocana cap on his head, took up the ringed staff, and went up into the hall to take his leave of the Great Immortal.
⚠ Three objects, and every one of them has a history. The 錦襴袈裟 is the brocade cassock the Buddha handed to Guanyin in Chapter 8 to give to whoever came for the scriptures — and which a prison guard was pricing three days ago, at the end of the last chapter, to stop a beating. The 錫杖, the ringed staff, came from the same handing-over. ⚠ The 毘盧帽 is a bishop's mitre of a hat, named for the cosmic Buddha Vairocana and worn only for high ritual. Tripitaka is not getting dressed. He is vesting, the way a priest vests before a service, and the book lists the items in the order you put them on.
The Great Immortal said with a laugh, "Yesterday in rags, today in splendour — looking at you now, you are truly a son of the Buddha."
⚠ 昨日襤褸，今日鮮明 — yesterday in rags, today in splendour. Four characters against four, and the Immortal is teasing. It is also a plain description: they arrived off the road after fourteen years of it, and the clothes in that bundle had been through a prison. ⚠ 睹此相 — looking at this appearance. The last character is xiàng, a look or a form, and not the xiāng of meeting one another that these pages have used twice already. It is the same character both times. 真佛子 — a true son of the Buddha. The Daoist is the one who says it, and he says it about a man he first saw the day before in rags.
Tripitaka bowed his farewell and made to set off.
Six characters, and they are the whole of Tripitaka's leave-taking. He bows and starts walking. The brevity is the setup. He is going to be stopped before he gets out of the room.
The Great Immortal said, "Wait a moment. Let me see you off."
⚠ 且住 — hold on. It is an interruption, and everything else in this scene follows from it. 送 — to see somebody off. The word has run through this chapter since its first sentence, where Squire Kou was seeing the pilgrims off with drums and banners for the second time. Here an old man offers to walk them up a road. The same verb, and about as different an act as it could name.
Tripitaka gets dressed, and the book lists what he puts on in the order he puts it on: cassock, cap, staff. All three came from the Buddha by way of Guanyin at the beginning of the story, and the cassock was in a prison store three days the beginning of the story, and three days ago a turnkey was pricing the cassock in a prison store. Wearing them now is not vanity. It is a man The Immortal's joke about yesterday's rags is kinder than it looks, and it is also the outsider's view. He is the only person in the novel who has seen these four at the very start of the errand — he watched Guanyin set off to find them — and at the very end of it. Yesterday in rags, today in splendour is a fourteen-year before-and-after, delivered as a pleasantry.
And then he stops them at the door. Tripitaka's farewell takes six characters and is interrupted after two of them. The rest of this block is about an old man insisting on walking his guests to the gate, and about what that turns out to mean.