紫芝翳翳，白石蒼蒼 Purple Fungus, White Stone
他卻牽了馬，挑了擔，出山凹，行上路口。此時漸漸黃昏，只聽得路南山坡下有犬吠之聲。二人停身觀看，乃是一家莊院，影影的有燈火光明。他兩個也不管有路無路，漫草而行，直至那家門首。但見：他却牵了马，挑了担，出山凹，行上路口。此时渐渐黄昏，只听得路南山坡下有犬吠之声。二人停身观看，乃是一家庄院，影影的有灯火光明。他两个也不管有路无路，漫草而行，直至那家门首。但见：
逐句解 Line by line
So he led out the horse, took up the luggage-pole, came out of the hollow and up onto the road.
擔 is dàn again, the load. 山凹 is the dip between hills where Bajie has been lying flat since the wind got up.
It was growing dusk by now, and they heard, from the southern slope below the road, the barking of a dog.
只聽得 hangs the perception off de. A dog barking below the road is a standing signal in this novel that a dwelling is close — and it is never quite an ordinary one.
The two of them stopped and looked. It was a farmstead, and there was the faint shining of a lamp in it.
影影的 is a doubled-up colloquial adverb, "faintly, dimly." Notice the sequence: the lamp is seen before the house is.
Caring nothing whether there was a path or none, they went through the grass and came straight to the gate of the house. And this was the sight:
漫草而行 is to strike out across the grass with no path at all. 但見： announces the description to come, and stays in the prose segment.
Purple fungus in shadowed masses; white stone pale and bare.
Every word here is doing double duty. 紫芝 is the purple lingzhi, the fungus of immortality, and 白石 the white stone of a recluse's hermitage — both lifted straight out of the Daoist vocabulary for holy solitude. Both are also lies. This farmstead does not exist.
Purple fungus in shadowed masses, and green grass thick between; / white stone pale and bare, half of it under green moss.
The poem unfolds its own opening line, four characters opening out into seven, exactly as the armour-poem did earlier. 綠苔 — moss on stone, the standard sign of a place nobody has disturbed in years.
A few points of firefly-light, glimmering; / a stand of wild trees, ranked close together.
數 is shù, "several." Fireflies and that barking dog are the only living things anywhere in the description.
Fragrant orchid, richly scented; tender bamboo, newly set.
馥郁 against 新栽: the orchid is established and the bamboo newly planted, which is what you would say about a place somebody looks after.
A clear spring runs in a winding gully; an ancient cypress leans on the deep cliff.
曲 reads qū, "winding." Spring, gully, cypress, cliff — this is the stock furniture of the hermit's dwelling in landscape poetry, assembled without a single surprise.
The place is remote, and no traveller comes to it; / before the gate there is only the wild flower, opening.
更 is the adverb gèng. The closing couplet manages to say, in the most courteous way available, that nobody lives here at all — and the pilgrims are about to knock at the gate and be shown in.
The farmstead poem is assembled entirely out of hermitage furniture — lingzhi, white stone, moss, orchid, bamboo, spring, cypress, cliff — and it closes on the flat observation that no visitor ever comes here. Every element of it is a signal to the reader. None of it is a signal to Bajie, who is hungry.
In the morning the pilgrims will find they slept on bare grass, and that the farm was run up for one night by the guardian spirits who follow them. Read a second time, the poem turns out to be a joke of some subtlety. It does not describe a farm. It describes a picture of a farm, built out of the most conventional materials on the shelf — which is precisely what the spirits had to work with.