Taizong was much pleased, and asked the officers in attendance at once: “Which monastery in the city of Chang'an is a clean one?”

那 is read nǎ here — the question word, which. Read nà it means that, and the sentence collapses into a statement about a monastery nobody has named. It is the only interrogative use of this character in the whole chapter, against sixteen ordinary ones, and nothing but the sense marks it. 潔淨 — clean, and it is a ritual word as much as a physical one. He is asking which house is fit.

Out of the ranks stepped the Grand Academician Xiao Yu, who reported: “In the city there is a Wild Goose Pagoda Monastery, and it is clean.”

蕭瑀 is not a new character. He is the minister who stood up in chapter twelve and defended Buddhism against the court sceptic who wanted it outlawed — and the man who met Guanyin in the street disguised as a shabby monk selling a cassock, and brought her into the palace. He appears fifteen times in that chapter and then not again until this line, eighty-eight chapters later, to answer a question about which monastery is clean. And his title has changed. In chapter twelve he was 宰相, chancellor. Here he is 大學士, grand academician. The novel does not remark on the demotion. 閃上 — flashed forward, stepped smartly out of the line.

Taizong at once ordered his officers: “Let each of you carry a few scrolls of the true scriptures reverently, and come with me to the Wild Goose Pagoda Monastery, and let my royal brother be asked to expound them.”

各虔捧幾卷 — each reverently holding a few scrolls. The whole Tang civil service is to walk across the capital with the canon divided among them, a handful each. 雁塔寺, the Wild Goose Pagoda. The historical Xuanzang had that tower built to house the scriptures he brought back, and it still stands in Xi'an. The novel names it before it exists. 去來 — an old vernacular tag on the end of a suggestion, roughly let's be off, then. It is the emperor talking like anybody.