Taizong asked further, “What is the count of the scriptures?”

⚠ His first question about the cargo is how many. Not what they say, not what they are for: the number. 經數 — the scripture-count. The emperor and the bodhisattva who audited the ledger last chapter want the same thing out of this journey, and it is a figure.

“And how were they got?”

⚠ 怎生 is the vernacular how — a colloquial form in the middle of a formal audience, and the sign that Taizong has stopped being an emperor for a moment and is simply curious. Six characters, and they open the longest speech the Tang monk makes in the chapter.

Sanzang said: “Your servant the monk reached the Spirit Mountain and was presented to the Buddha, who dispatched the two venerables Ananda and Kasyapa to lead us first into the Jewel Tower, where a meal was granted, and then to the Treasure Pavilion, where the scriptures were handed down.”

⚠ 蒙差 — dispatched under commission. Read chāi: the word for sending a man on an official errand, the same one behind an imperial commissioner. The bare reading gives the chà of wrong or wanting, which is not what a buddha does to his attendants. ⚠ 伽葉 is Kasyapa, and this edition spells him two ways. Chapters seven, eight and seventy-seven write the name with one character; this chapter and the one before it write it with a near-twin that differs by a couple of strokes. Same man, same door, different graph — and read the same way, because the word governs, not the shape. ⚠ The second graph is read shè, not the yè of a leaf, and the reason is Sanskrit. In older Chinese this character carried a second sound in the region of shè, and that is what renders the ending of Kasyapa; the leaf-reading's initial does not fit at all. The old dictionaries keep the band, and the Buddhist reference works and the reciting tradition still hold to it. Modern secular dictionaries have given up on it — the shape now means almost nothing but a leaf, so the common sound was carried over — and they list the name the other way. This edition follows the older reading, as it does for every other transcription in the book. 臣僧, your servant the monk. He calls himself a subject before he calls himself a monk.

“Those venerables demanded a present, and because we had not got one ready we gave them nothing — so they handed the scriptures over as they were.”

⚠ 需索人事 — demanded a gift. 人事 here is not human affairs but the customary present you bring an official to get a thing done, and 需索 is the verb for squeezing it out of somebody. In plain English: they asked for a bribe. And he tells his emperor. Standing in the Tang court, in front of the assembled officers, the Tang monk reports that the Buddha's own attendants shook him down and that he had nothing to give them. 未曾備得 — had not managed to get one ready. He does not say he refused. He says he had not thought to bring one.