As they were talking, evening came on before they knew it. The servants set out table and benches and brought several dishes of well-cooked tiger meat, steaming hot, and laid them above. Boqin invited Sanzang to take some for the present, saying he would have other food prepared. Sanzang, pressing his palms together at his breast, said: “Bless you! I will not deceive the Guardian: from the time I left my mother's womb I have been a monk, and have never so much as known how to eat flesh.” Hearing this, Boqin pondered a good while and said: “Elder, in my house, for generations back, we have not known how to eat vegetarian fare. We have a little bamboo shoot, and gather some wood-ears, and look out some dried greens, and make a little bean-curd — but they are all fried in the fat of roe and deer, of tiger and leopard, so there is hardly anything vegetarian about them. Even our two cooking-pots and their stoves are soaked through with grease. What is to be done? It turns out I have done wrong in inviting the elder at all.”

The comic dilemma of the wholly carnivorous household is drawn with affectionate detail — even the “vegetables” are fried in tiger-fat, and the very pots are steeped in grease. 葷 (hūn) is meat and the pungent alliums forbidden to a Buddhist; 素 (sù) is vegetarian fare.

Sanzang said: “The Guardian need not trouble himself — pray take your own meal. Even were I this poor monk to go three or five days without eating, I could bear the hunger; only I dare not break my vow of abstinence.” Boqin said: “But what if you should starve to death?” Sanzang said: “By the Guardian's Heaven-sent grace I have been saved out of the very thicket of tigers and wolves; and even were I to starve to death, it would be better than being fed to a tiger.”

齋戒 (zhāi jiè), the “vow of abstinence,” is the monastic discipline Sanzang will not break even at the risk of his life; his answer sounds the note of a resolve no hardship can move — the very quality the Gold Star's gāthā had bidden him keep.