Among them was yet another young monk, Guangmou by name, brother-disciple to that same Guangzhi, who came forward and said, "That plan is not good.

A second young monk steps forward, and the pair of them are worth naming together: 廣謀, "Broad Scheming," is brother-disciple to 廣智, "Broad Wisdom." 中 is zhōng. And note the ground of his objection — 此計不妙, the plan is not good, meaning not clever. He is not troubled that it is murder. He is troubled that it might not work, and that is the more chilling of the two.

"If we mean to kill them, we must first see how matters stand.

看看動靜 is "observe how things stir" — reconnaissance before an operation. Nothing in his speech will ever touch the question of whether the thing should be done at all.

"The white-faced one looks easy; the hairy-faced one looks hard. If we should fail to kill him, would we not bring the disaster back upon ourselves?

似 is sì, twice over. 白臉的 and 毛臉的 — the white-faced one and the hairy-faced one: precisely as much as these monks have understood of their guests. 殺他不得 takes the potential dé, "cannot manage to kill him." And 反招己禍, "bring the calamity back on oneself," is the whole of his moral reasoning.

"I have a method that uses neither knife nor spear. I do not know how it strikes your honoured mind?" The old monk said, "My son, what method is this?"

不動刀槍之法 is "a method that does not move knife or spear." The euphemism is exquisite. Nothing will be moved but firewood.

Guangmou said, "By this small grandson's reckoning: summon now the heads of every quarter, great and small, of the eastern hill, and let each man bring a bundle of dry firewood;

小孫, "this little grandson," continues the family idiom — he is proposing arson and referring to himself as a grandchild. 乾柴 is gān chái, dry firewood. 房頭 are the quarters, or sub-cloisters, into which a large monastery was divided, each under its own head: a bureaucracy, and one that can be mobilised inside an hour.

"give up those three rooms of the meditation hall, set them alight, and leave them no door to escape by — horse and all consumed in a single fire.

捨, "to give up, to sacrifice," is a word from the vocabulary of almsgiving — the monastery will donate its meditation hall to the fire. 教 is the causative jiào. And 連馬一火焚之: even the dragon-prince, still going about as a horse, is included in the accounting.

"And should the households before and behind the hill see it, we need only say that he was careless himself, that a fire got away from him and burned our meditation hall down.

將 is jiāng, putting the object first; 都 is dōu. The lie is prepared before the fire is lit, and it is a good lie: a careless traveller, a lamp knocked over, a hall lost. Guangmou has thought about what will be said afterwards, which is more than Guangzhi ever did.

"As for those two monks — will they not both be burned to death? And it covers over men's eyes and ears. Will not the cassock be our family's treasure handed down?"

掩人耳目, "to cover men's eyes and ears," is still the ordinary Chinese for a cover-up. The rhetorical question 豈不是我們傳家之寶？ repeats Guangzhi's phrase exactly — the plan has changed, the object has not.

Hearing him, not one of the monks failed to rejoice. "Strong! Strong! Strong!" they all said. "This plan is better still, better still."

強，強，強 ("Strong! Strong! Strong!") is a shout of vernacular approval, and it answers the 好，好，好 with which the old monk greeted the first plan. Two hundred and thirty men have now assented to burning two guests alive, and the text records not one dissenting voice.

So each quarter was ordered to fetch its firewood. Alas! This plan of theirs — it was just as the saying has it:

唉！ The storyteller's sigh — and then 正是, "it was precisely as the saying goes," which introduces a capping couplet. The tag-line stays with the prose; the couplet that follows it is verse.

Contriving it so that a long-lived old monk should meet his appointed end, and the Chan cloister of Guanyin be turned to dust.

Two lines of verse set into the middle of the prose, tagged with 正是, "it was precisely as the saying goes" — the storyteller's way of stopping to deliver a verdict. 弄得 takes a neutral de; 該命盡 is "his fated life was to be exhausted" (盡 is always jìn); 化為塵, "turned to dust," has 為 read wéi. The verdict is a death-notice served more than a third of the chapter before the death it announces, and it names both victims: an old man, and a house dedicated to the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Now, in that monastery of theirs there were seventy or eighty quarters, and its inmates, great and small, numbered above two hundred.

The census is placed here, immediately after the couplet, and it does the work of a verdict: 七八十個房頭，大小有二百餘眾. Not two conspirators and a weeping abbot — a community of more than two hundred.

That night, in one throng, they carried firewood, and heaped the meditation hall about, before and behind, hemming in all four sides so that nothing could pass; and there they made ready to set the fire — of which no more for now.

當夜 takes dāng. 一擁 is "in a single press of bodies." The verbs are the verbs of ordinary monastic labour — carrying, heaping, encircling — and the four-sided enclosure they build is the exact shape of the walls of a meditation hall. 不題 closes the thread.