The three of them went forward on the westward road, and for a month or so all was quiet.

有個月平穩, "some month of quiet." The novel disposes of thirty days in five graphs, and will do so again and again.

They passed the borders of Ü-Tsang, and looking up of a sudden saw a high mountain.

烏斯藏 transcribes Ü-Tsang, the central provinces of Tibet; 藏 is zàng, not cáng. The geography is roughly right and entirely unvisited.

Sanzang reined in his horse and said: "Wukong, Wuneng — the mountain ahead is high. We must go carefully, very carefully."

勒馬: 勒 is lè, to rein. 須索, "must needs" — a Yuan-drama idiom. 仔細 takes 仔 as zǐ (pypinyin gives zǎi); its doubling is Sanzang's whole character in two words.

Bajie said: "It is nothing. This mountain is called Pagoda Mountain,

浮屠 transcribes buddha and also, by extension, stūpa: hence "Pagoda Mountain."

and in it there lives a Crow's Nest Chan Master, who practises here. Old Hog has met him before."

烏巢禪師, the Crow's Nest Chan Master — named for the nest of twigs he lives in, which the reader is about to see. 老豬 again: Bajie has his own honorific now.

Sanzang said: "What is his occupation?"

勾當 takes 勾 as gòu and 當 as dàng: business, occupation. Sanzang's question is faintly suspicious, as it will be of every holy man they meet.

Bajie said: "He has some attainment in the Way. He once urged me to follow him in cultivation, but I did not go, and there was an end of it."

道行 — spiritual attainment — takes 行 as héng, while 修行 in the next clause takes xíng. Two readings, eight graphs apart. 罷了, "and there was an end of it," is Bajie summarising the greatest missed opportunity of his life.

As master and disciples talked, they came in no long time up onto the mountain. A fine mountain! Look at it:

好山 and 但見那： are the storyteller's lead-in to the landscape rhapsody, and stay inside the prose segment.

On the mountain's south are green pines and dark junipers; on the mountain's north, willows in leaf and peaches in flower.

檜 is guì, the Chinese juniper. The 賦 opens with the standard south–north antithesis of the mountain-rhapsody.

A clamour and a chattering: the mountain birds answer one another;

鬧聒聒: 聒 is guō, not guā. The three-graph reduplicated opening is the signature of this metre.

a whirling and a wheeling: the immortal cranes fly up together.

This unit and the last are the two halves of a matched pair joined by ；. Under the convention fixed in chapter seventeen, such pairs are kept split: each half is its own verse unit.

A fragrance, thick and sweet: the flowers in a thousand hues;

馥馥, richly fragrant. The pair-structure repeats.

a green so deep it darkens: the wild grasses in ten thousand kinds.

冉冉, deepening, gradually suffusing — used of colour spreading, and of time passing.

Below the ravine are waters running green; before the cliff are clouds of blessing in drifts and clusters.

The couplet returns to full seven-graph parallelism, 澗下／崖前, 滔滔／朵朵.

Truly the scene is a place of rare seclusion, still, with never a traveller in sight.

寂然不見往來人 — the rhapsody ends on an absence. A landscape without travellers, and three travellers are looking at it.