The next day the monkeys did indeed go gathering: immortal peaches and rare fruits, digging up yams and hoeing Solomon's-seal,

果去 is "did indeed go," 果 working as an adverb. Notice what they dig for. 刨 (páo) is to dig up and 斸 (zhú) to hoe out, and both 山藥 (yam) and 黃精 (Solomon's-seal) are roots prized in Daoist diet as foods of long life. The farewell menu for a quest after immortality is itself made of immortality food.

with sprays of fragrant orchid, magic herbs and exotic flowers, every kind of thing, all set out neat and trim,

香蕙 is a fragrant orchid, a variety of 蘭. 般般件件，整整齊齊 — "every kind of thing, all neat and tidy" — is a doubled colloquial phrase whose job is completeness: nothing left out, nothing out of place.

laying out the stone benches and stone tables and ranging the immortal wine and viands. And this is what one saw:

仙酒仙餚 is "immortal wine and dishes" (餚 = 肴, cooked food). Then 但見那, the cue for a set-piece — and the 賦 it introduces is one of the most celebrated pieces of food writing in the novel.

Gold globes and pearl pellets, red-bursting and yellow-plump.

The fruit-賦 opens with pure metaphor before it names a single thing: 金丸珠彈, golden globes and pearl pellets (彈 dàn, a pellet), and 紅綻黃肥, red and splitting, yellow and fat (綻 zhàn, to burst open). Colour and shape first, identity afterwards. The next two lines will pin each phrase to an actual fruit.

Gold globes, pearl pellets — winter cherries, their colour truly sweet and fair;

臘櫻桃 are winter cherries (臘 là, the twelfth month). The 賦 now picks up its own opening image and lands it: the golden globes turn out to be cherries.

red-bursting, yellow-plump — ripe plums, fragrant and tart to the taste.

And the other half of the pair comes down on ripe plums (子 the neutral suffix). Setting an image loose and then catching it is a standard move in this kind of verse, and it makes a list feel like a reveal.

Fresh longans, flesh sweet and skin thin;

龍眼 means "dragon-eyes," which is a fair description of a peeled longan: white flesh around a black stone. 皮薄 reads 薄 as báo, the colloquial "thin," not bó.

fire-lychees, pit small and pulp red.

火荔枝, "fire-lychees," a red variety. 核 (hé) is the stone and 囊 (náng) the flesh-sac around it — the poem is describing exactly what you see when you open one.

Crabapples, jade-green fruit offered on the bough; loquats in pale husks held up with their leaves.

林檎 is the Chinese crabapple, 枇杷 the loquat. 緗苞 is a pale-yellow husk (緗 xiāng) and 擎 (qíng) is to hold up. Both fruits are still on the branch here, offered rather than picked, as though the trees themselves were laying the table.

Rabbit-head pears and chicken-heart dates, that quench thirst, dispel care, and cure the wine's after-ache.

Two fruits named for their shapes — "rabbit-head" pears and "chicken-heart" jujubes — and then a small medical claim. 解酲 (jiě chéng) is curing a hangover, 酲 being the morning after. At a banquet with wine on the table, that is a practical thing to work into a poem.

Fragrant peaches and softened apricots, sweet as jade nectar and gem-broth;

爛杏 is apricots gone soft with ripeness (爛 làn). 玉液瓊漿, "jade fluid and gemstone broth" (瓊 qióng), is the stock phrase for what the immortals drink — the highest praise available for anything in a cup.

crisp plums and bayberries, tart and lush as rich cream and curd.

楊梅 is the bayberry, sometimes sold as the "Chinese strawberry." 酸蔭蔭 is a doubled colloquial "lushly tart," and 脂酥膏酪 (酥 sū, 酪 lào) piles up words for fat, cream and curd. Comparing fruit to dairy is an unusual move in Chinese verse, and a rich one.

Red-fleshed, black-seeded ripe watermelons; four-lobed, yellow-skinned great persimmons.

Red flesh, black seeds: a watermelon, described so exactly you can see the cut face of it (子 here zǐ, "seeds," full tone). Then 四瓣, four lobes, of a big yellow-skinned persimmon — where 子 is the neutral suffix zi.

Pomegranates split open, their cinnabar grains like fire-crystal beads;

A split pomegranate, its seeds compared to grains of 丹砂, cinnabar, and to beads of fire-crystal. Cinnabar is the alchemist's red mineral, the raw material of the elixir — so the fruit poem has quietly slipped a laboratory into a fruit bowl.

taro and chestnuts cut apart, firm flesh in lumps of golden agate.

Taro and chestnuts cut open (剖 pōu), their flesh likened to golden 瑪瑙, agate. The 維基文庫 text reads 堅硬肉團, "firm flesh in lumps"; some editions read 黃肉團欒.

Walnuts and ginkgo, good to serve with tea; coconuts and grapes, fit to be made into wine.

Walnuts and ginkgo nuts to pass round with the tea (傳 chuán), coconuts and grapes to turn into wine. The catalogue has moved on from what grows to what you do with it.

Hazel, pine-nut, torreya and crabapple heaped high on plates; tangerine, cane, mandarin and orange filling the tables.

Four nuts in one line — 榛松榧柰, hazel, pine-nut, torreya and crabapple (榧 fěi) — heaped on plates (盛 here chéng, to fill), answered in the next by four sweet things, 橘蔗柑橙, tangerine, sugarcane, mandarin and orange, laid out along the tables. Four against four. The poem is showing off, and it has earned it.

Well-stewed yam, soft-boiled Solomon's-seal,

煨 (wēi) is to simmer in embers and 爛煮 is to boil until soft. The longevity roots from the opening lines have come back as actual dishes: the medicine cabinet is now the kitchen.

pounded poria and Job's-tears — in a stone pot, over a low fire, slowly simmered to a broth.

茯苓 (poria, a fungus that grows on pine roots) and 薏苡 (Job's-tears) join the yam and the Solomon's-seal — all four classic foods of Daoist long-life practice. Pounded and simmered slowly in a stone pot, they turn a farewell dinner into something closer to a course of treatment. 羹 (gēng) is a thick broth.

Though the world of men have its rarest delicacies, how could they match the mountain monkeys' deeper peace?

珍饈 is rare delicacies. The 賦 closes by setting the monkeys' plain mountain pleasure above anything the human world can serve — a last look at the Eden the king is leaving, in a poem that never once mentions why he is leaving it. 寧 here is níng, peace, contentment.

The monkeys honoured the Handsome Monkey King with the high seat, and ranged themselves below in order of age and rank,

The court order set up at the crowning is being kept to the letter, one last time: 各依齒肩，each according to 齒, teeth — and so age — and 肩, shoulder — and so rank. Chinese has long reckoned seniority by teeth, the way English once reckoned it by grey hairs.

and one by one they came forward in turn to offer wine, offer flowers, offer fruit; and they drank deep for a whole day.

Wine, flowers, fruit, offered in turn — the triple 奉 gives the meal the shape of a rite rather than a party. 痛飲 is to drink your fill, and they keep at it all day. (一 takes its yí tone before the falling tone of 日.)

The next day the Handsome Monkey King rose early and gave the order: 'Little ones, break me some dead pine and weave it into a raft;

教 here is jiào, to tell or order, not jiāo, to teach. 栰子 is a raft (栰 = 筏) and 折 (zhé) is to break off. Dead pine, snapped by hand and lashed together: the seeker after eternal life is setting out on the cheapest vessel imaginable.

take a bamboo pole for a punt, and gather some fruit and the like — I am about to set off.'

A bamboo pole for a punt (篙 gāo), some fruit for the crossing, and that is the whole expedition. 我將去也 takes 將 as jiāng, "about to."

He did indeed mount the raft alone, pushed off with all his might, and drifting and rocking, headed straight out into the waves of the great sea,

儘力撐開 is shoving off with everything he has (儘 = 盡; 撐 chēng, to pole). Then the verbs go slack — 飄飄蕩蕩, drifting and rocking — with 徑向, straight out (徑 jìng). He pushes hard once and the sea takes over, which is roughly how the rest of his life will go.

riding the heaven-sent wind to cross to the land of the Southern Continent of Jambudvīpa. This setting-out was just as the lines tell:

趁天風 is riding a heaven-sent wind (趁 chèn). 南贍部洲 is Jambudvīpa, the southern continent of the Buddhist scheme — the human world, where the gibbon said the deathless masters are to be found.

A Heaven-born immortal monkey, deep in spiritual power, leaves his mountain and rides a raft on the heaven-sent wind.

The departure gets a capping poem. 道行 reads dào héng, spiritual attainment or magical power, with 行 as héng, not xíng; 隆 is deep, abundant. Which is a curious thing to say about a monkey who has learned nothing at all yet. The verse is crediting him with a destiny rather than a record.

Drifting over oceans, crossing seas, he seeks the immortals' Way; with set resolve and a focused heart he would build a great work.

立志潛心 is a fixed will and a settled mind (潛 qián); 建大功 is to build a great work. The voyage is being framed as a religious undertaking, which from the monkey's own point of view it is not. He simply does not want to die.

Having the lot and the bond, he is done with worldly wishes; without care, without worry, he goes to meet the Primal Dragon.

有分有緣 pairs 分 (fèn), your allotted portion, with 緣, the karmic bond that brings two things together: he has both the entitlement and the connection. 會元龍 is to meet the "Primal Dragon," a figure for the great hidden master — or for the primal power itself — waiting at the end of the crossing.

It may be he will surely meet one who knows his heart, who will lay bare the source so that the ten thousand methods are understood.

知音 means "one who knows the tune," and it comes from a famous story: the zither player Bó Yá (伯牙) had a single listener, Zhōng Zǐqī (鍾子期), who could hear precisely what he was thinking, and when Zhong died Bo Ya broke his instrument and never played again. So a 知音 is not a friend — it is the one person who understands you. 說破源流，萬法通, "lay the source bare and the ten thousand methods come clear," points ahead to Patriarch Subodhi, and chimes with the chapter title's 源流出, "the source flows forth."