Taizong and his officers all saw them together, and he came straight down from the tower to meet them, calling: “Is it my royal brother?”

即下樓相迎 — he came down at once to meet them. An emperor does not go down to anybody. He waits, and the visitor is brought up. Taizong is off the tower before anyone can stop him. 御弟, royal younger brother, is the title Taizong gave the Tang monk when he sent him out — the emperor made him kin so that the errand would be a family matter. Fourteen years later it is still what he calls him, and it is the first thing out of his mouth. And it is a question. Not a greeting, not a proclamation: is it you? The man has been gone long enough that his sovereign is not sure.

The Tang monk at once threw himself down and bowed.

倒身 — to throw the body down. Its first character is read dǎo, to fall over, not dào, to pour or reverse. He has just become a buddha. He is greeted as a brother by an emperor who ran down a staircase for him. And he puts himself flat on the ground, because that is what a subject does. The two men move in opposite directions in the space of one sentence: the emperor comes down to him, and he goes lower still.

Taizong raised him up, and asked further: “Who are these three?”

攙起 — took him by the arm and lifted him. The emperor will not let him stay down. Then the question, and it is a small shock. Taizong has no idea who the disciples are. The reader has spent ninety chapters with them; the man who sent the Tang monk out has never heard of any of them.

The Tang monk said, “Disciples I took in along the way.”

Six characters for the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, the Marshal of the Heavenly Reeds and the Curtain-Lifting General. 途中收的徒弟 — disciples picked up on the road. It is accurate and it is nothing like the truth, and the novel lets it stand without comment. Everything the reader knows about these three is left out of the only description their master ever gives of them to his sovereign.