That prince said, “From what quarter do you come, that you use such a hiding-spell to make sport of me?”

His first theory is that he is being conjured at. 隱身法 is a vanishing-spell — reasonable, given a rabbit that turned into an arrow. 那方 has 那 as the question word nǎ, "which quarter"; 那太子 in the same line has the same character as the pointing nà. Two words, one shape — Ming printing had not yet split off 哪.

Tripitaka came forward, made his bow, and said, “This poor monk has no hiding-spell; I am the Tang Monk of the Eastern Land, a monk going up to Thunderclap Monastery to worship the Buddha, seek the scriptures, and present treasures.”

Tripitaka finally stands up and behaves, and gives the full credentials. 貧僧 pín sēng, "this poor monk," is the standard humble self-reference of a cleric — the monastic answer to the king's 寡人 earlier. 佛 is always fó.

The prince said, “Though your Eastern Land is the Central Plain, its poverty is beyond compare; what treasures have you? Tell me and let me hear.”

The prince's snobbery is geographical and rather good: your Central Plain may be the centre of the world, but it is famously poor. Then the fatal question — what treasures? — which is the one Wukong scripted for him two passages ago, almost word for word. 中原 takes the locative zhōng; 有甚 has 甚 as shén; 那東土 takes the pointing nà.

Tripitaka said, “This cassock I wear upon my body is a treasure of the third kind.

And the pitch begins, exactly as rehearsed. 袈裟 jiā shā transcribes the Sanskrit kāṣāya, the monastic robe — literally "dyed off-colour," since the cloth was deliberately stained to something no layman would wear.

There are yet finer things of the first grade and the second.”

The hook, delivered on cue. 第一等 keeps 一 as yī, the ordinal; 還有 has 還 as hái.

The prince said, “That garment of yours, covering half the body and baring half the arm — how much can it be worth, that you dare call it a treasure?”

The prince declines to be impressed, and his objection is a good one: half the garment is missing. 苫身 is to cover the body; 露臂 is to bare the arm; 那衣服 takes the pointing nà.

Tripitaka said, “Though this cassock does not clothe the whole body, there are some lines of verse upon it.

So Tripitaka answers the objection with a poem — the standard move when a Chinese narrative wants to raise the stakes on an object. 不全體 is "does not clothe the whole body."

The verse says:

詩曰 — "the verse says." The plainest of the verse cues.

The Buddha-robe, bared at one shoulder, needs no debate; within it hides the True Suchness, freed from worldly dust.

The poem answers the prince's mockery head-on: the bared shoulder is not a defect but the correct way to wear the robe. 偏袒 piān tǎn is that bared right shoulder, a mark of respect in Indian and Buddhist practice. 真如 zhēn rú is Suchness, the Sanskrit tathatā — reality just as it is, hidden inside the cloth, which is the whole argument. 佛 is always fó.

Ten thousand threads and a thousand stitches make the true fruit; nine pearls and eight jewels join the primal spirit.

The needlework becomes soteriology. 正果 is the true fruit, the goal of practice; 元神 is the primal spirit, a term borrowed from Daoist inner alchemy — the poem is quietly mixing its vocabularies, which the novel does constantly.

Immortal maids and holy women reverently wrought it, bestowed on the Chan monk to still and cleanse his body.

Its makers are named: immortal maidens sewed it. 仙娥 are immortal maids; 遺賜 is to bestow; 靜垢身 is to still and cleanse a body that is by nature defiled.

To fail to rise before the sovereign might yet be borne; but your father’s wrong unavenged — in vain, then, are you a man!”

And here the poem turns and stabs. The first seven lines run to seven characters each; this last one runs to nine — the metre breaking open at precisely the moment the subject stops being a robe and becomes the boy standing in front of it. Read it aloud and the line overruns, which is the point. 見駕不迎 is failing to rise before the sovereign; 枉為人 is "in vain a man," with 為 as wéi, to be, not wèi, for the sake of.