At this the Candana Buddha, the Buddha of Strife, the Cleanser of the Altars and the Arhat of the Golden Body all came into their proper places of right fruit, and the Heavenly Dragon-Horse likewise returned to the true.

Read the list in order and the ranking is on the page: two buddhas, then an envoy, then an arhat — and the horse, given a separate clause of his own. 正果了本位 — took up their original stations in right fruit. 本位 is a post on a chart: the place that was always theirs. 亦自歸真 — likewise returned to the true, of himself. The horse gets the shortest sentence and the only one with of himself in it.

There are verses in witness of it.

有詩為證 — the storyteller's oldest formula, and the chapter has saved it for last. Its third character is read wéi, the light verb: to serve as proof. It appears exactly once in this chapter, here, and it comes paired with the cue that follows.

The poem runs:

Three characters. The two cues together — there are verses in witness; the poem runs — are the most formal introduction the novel has, and they are being spent on the last poem in the book.

The single body of True Suchness turned and fell into the dust; harmonising the Four Marks, he cultivated the body anew.

真如 — tathatā, True Suchness: things exactly as they are, the Buddhist name for reality before anybody describes it. The poem starts at the very top and falls in seven characters. 四相 — the Four Marks. Its second character is read xiàng, a mark or an appearance, not xiāng, mutually. In the Diamond Sutra the four are the notions of a self, a person, a being and a lifespan — the four ideas you have to let go of.

In the reckoning of the Five Phases, form is empty and still; the hollow names of a hundred fiends — speak of them no more.

The line the whole chapter's reading work has been circling. 還 here is hái, the little word that joins two descriptions — empty and also still. The novel uses that frame nine other times in exactly this position, and its closest twin is a road that is secluded and also quiet. And the last character of the second half is the reading this project ruled at Chapter 65 and never shipped until now. The poem rhymes dust · body · 論 · sinking · gate — every one a level tone but this. In a level rhyme the character takes its level band, lún, which the dictionaries give as its first reading for the sense of discussing. And the same character stands four places earlier in the same line, in 五行論色, where it is the ordinary lùn. One character, two words, one line — the last piece of wordplay in the novel, and nobody flags it.

Right fruit for Candana, who returns to the great awakening; the grade of office completed, he sheds the sinking under.

完成品職 — the grade of office completed. Even the closing poem calls buddhahood a rank filled in. 沉淪 — sinking and drowning, the standard word for being caught in the round of rebirth. It is also the rhyme word, and it rhymes with dust in the first line: the poem falls into the dust and climbs out of the sinking.

The scriptures handed on through the empire, the light of grace is wide; the Five Saints sit high at the gate of no-two.

五聖 — the Five Saints. That is the second half of the chapter's own title, and the count includes the horse. Four men and an animal. 不二門, the gate of no-two — the understanding in which opposites stop being opposites. It gave modern Chinese its everyday phrase for the only way, and last chapter's crossing poem opened on the same three characters. 經傳天下 — the scriptures passed on through the empire. What the poem chooses to record is not the mountain but the distribution.