Scarcely was the word spoken and he was gone without a trace. In a moment he had come to the Southern Sea, and halted his cloud to look. Behold it:

須臾間 is in the space of an instant. The Pilgrim crosses from the western marches of Tang China to the Southern Sea between two clauses, and the narrative then stops dead for a hundred and sixty-four characters of water.

A boundless ocean, far-reaching; the force of the water joined with the sky.

The rhapsody starts with the sea and will not leave it for five units. 汪洋 is vast and spreading.

Auspicious light enfolds the cosmos; a lucky vapour lights the hills and streams.

籠 reads lǒng, to enfold or cover over — not the lóng of a cage. 祥光 and 瑞氣, auspicious light and lucky vapour, are the standard indicators that you have arrived somewhere sacred.

A thousand tiers of snowy breakers roar into the blue empyrean; ten thousand folds of misty wave surge through the white day.

滔白晝 — the waves surge through the daylight itself, as though the day were another substance they could break over. This couplet is the loudest thing in the chapter.

The water flies to the four quarters; the billows roll round about.

The eight-character unit states in miniature what the fourteen-character unit immediately after it will expand — the same expansion-by-repetition already used in the rhapsody at the bear-fiend's cave.

Water flying to the four quarters shakes the rolling thunder; billows rolling round about sound the thunderclap.

振轟雷 and 鳴霹靂: the poet describes the sea entirely in thunder, which is not a property water has.

Speak no more of the water's force: look rather at what lies within.

休言水勢，且看中間 — say no more about the water, look at what is in the middle of it. This is the rhetorical pivot the 賦 exists for: having spent five units on the sea, the poet dismisses the sea. 中 reads zhōng.

Dim in five colours, the jewelled and terraced mountain — red, yellow, purple, black, green and blue.

皂 is black. The six colours are simply named, with no figure of speech attached to any of them, and the effect is of an inventory taken by someone too dazzled to compose properly.

Only now is Guanyin's true and excellent realm to be seen: look upon Mount Luojia of the Southern Sea.

落伽山: 伽 reads qié, as in 伽藍 and 瑜伽. This is Potalaka, the Bodhisattva's island.

A goodly place! The peaks rise high, their summits piercing the void.

好去處, a goodly place — the very same three characters the narrator has already spent on Black Wind Mountain and on the bear-fiend's cave.

Within are a thousand kinds of rare flower and a hundred sorts of auspicious herb.

中間: zhōng. The catalogue of rare flowers and auspicious herbs answers, item for item, the catalogue at the fiend's front gate.

Wind shakes the jewelled trees; sun glances on the golden lotus.

金蓮, the golden lotus, is both a flower growing here and the seat the Bodhisattva sits on.

The Hall of Guanyin, roofed with tiles of lapis glass;

琉璃 is lapis, or coloured glass. The source divides the unit at the semicolon; the two halves are a matched pair and are kept apart here, the same treatment given to the mountain rhapsody at the opening of the chapter.

the Cave of Tidal Sound, its door laid over with tortoiseshell.

潮音洞 is the Cave of Tidal Sound. 鋪 reads pū, to lay over or spread across.

In the shade of the green willows the parrot talks; in the purple bamboo grove the peacock cries.

中: zhōng. 鸚哥, the parrot, and the peacock are Guanyin's birds; the green willow and the purple bamboo are her grove. Every fixture in this landscape is hers by iconographic right.

On the veined stone the guardians of the Law stand august;

羅紋石 is stone veined like figured silk. 護法 are the guardians of the Dharma.

before the agate strand, Moksha stands stalwart.

木叉 is Mokṣa — Huì'àn, the Bodhisattva's disciple and the second son of the Heavenly King. The rhapsody ends on a name, exactly as the bear-fiend's armour-poem did.