找路奔西 Westward Again
行者遂伏侍唐僧上馬，八戒挑著行囊，沙僧跟隨左右，師徒們找大路，一直奔西。這的是：行者遂伏侍唐僧上马，八戒挑着行囊，沙僧跟随左右，师徒们找大路，一直奔西。这的是：
逐句解 Line by line
Pilgrim then waited upon the Tang Monk to mount, Eight Rules shouldered the luggage, Sha Monk followed to left and right, and master and disciples found the main road and made straight for the west.
行者 行 xíng; 挑著 durative 著 zhe, 挑 tiāo (to carry on a pole); 行囊 行 xíng. The pilgrimage resumes its formation, the crossing behind them.
This is it:
這的是 with the colon is the verse-tag closing the chapter's narrative; the couplet following sums the arc of the Tongtian. By the standing rule it takes a 4-chip verse passage.
The holy monk, by imperial charge, goes to worship Amitābha; / the waters far, the mountains distant, his calamities are many.
拜彌陀, to worship Amitābha; 災難: 難 nàn, the noun "calamity." The first line names the mission, the second its cost — the many perils of the road, of which the Tongtian is one.
His will and heart are true, and he fears not death; / the white turtle bore him in ferry across the River of Heaven.
白黿 黿 (yuán); 馱渡, to carry across on the back. The closing couplet fixes the chapter's emblem — the pilgrim ferried over the sky-river on a turtle's shell — as the image the reader is to keep.
The closing verse is a two-line summation, of the kind the novel places at the end of an episode to fix its shape. The first couplet-line restates the mission in its most formal terms — 聖僧奉旨拜彌陀, the holy monk sent by imperial charge to worship the Buddha — and the second names its price, 水遠山遙災難多, the far waters and distant mountains and the many calamities. This is the frame the whole pilgrimage hangs in: a commission from the Tang emperor, and a road whose length is measured in disasters survived.
The second couplet turns from the mission to the man and then to the emblem. 意志心誠不懼死, his will true and unafraid of death, is Tripitaka's constancy — the quality that carried him across a river that had nearly drowned him; and 白黿馱渡過天河, the white turtle bearing him over the River of Heaven, is the image the chapter leaves in the mind. The arc of the Tongtian, three chapters long, resolves into this single picture: not the demon, not the battle, not the fish in the basket, but the pilgrim carried dry across the water on the back of a living creature he had nearly struck down.