Now the Bodhisattva recited the words several times over and only then fell silent, whereupon the fiend's pain at once subsided.

The chapter opens in the middle of a fight that started two chapters ago, and 卻說 is how the storyteller gets you back into it: "now to take it up again." It is the spoken equivalent of "previously, on -" and it turns up four times in this chapter, each time to swap one thread for another.

Coming to himself and rising to look, he found gold fillets clasped about his neck and upon his hands and feet, biting into him so that they hurt; yet when he set to strip the rings away, he could not budge them so much as a hair's breadth.

He wakes, stands, looks down, and finds the jewellery has arrived. 褪 is tùn, the word for sliding a ring or a sleeve off - not the tuì of colours fading. 勒 is lēi, everyday speech for pulling something tight, not the bookish lè.

For once these treasures met the flesh they took root there, and the more he clawed at them the more they pained him.

Once they touch skin they take hold: 見肉生根, "meeting flesh, they strike root." Then 越抹越痛 - the more he rubs, the worse it hurts - which makes his own struggling the cause of the pain. 已此 is a spoken slip for 已是.

Pilgrim laughed and said, "My dear little darling — the Bodhisattva feared you might not be reared to full growth, and so has fitted you with a neck-ring and a pair of bracelets!"

Pilgrim cannot resist. Chinese families put a silver ring round a small child's neck and bands on its wrists to keep it safe until it was grown; that is exactly what 頸圈鐲頭 names. So the shackles become baby jewellery, and 乖乖 - roughly "there's a good boy" - keeps up the nursery voice.

Hearing this, the boy fell again into a rage, snatched up his spear, and thrust wildly at Pilgrim.

The joke lands badly. 綽 is chāo, to snatch a weapon up off the ground, not the chuò of "ample"; it appears once in the whole chapter, here.

Pilgrim dodged aside in haste and, taking his stand behind the Bodhisattva, cried out, "Recite the spell! Recite the spell!"

Pilgrim ducks behind the Bodhisattva and shouts for the spell, which is funny for a reason the novel never spells out: he spends the whole book on the receiving end of exactly this arrangement, and here he gets to be the one calling for it.

The Bodhisattva dipped her willow spray in a drop of sweet dew, flicked it toward him, and called aloud, "Join!"

She flicks a drop of sweet dew off a willow spray and says one word: 合, "join." It snaps his palms together, and it is a pun - 合掌 is the palms-pressed gesture of reverence, the Sanskrit añjali. She does not command worship. She commands a hand position, and the worship follows.

At once he let fall the spear, and his two hands pressed palm to palm against his breast, never again to be opened.

His hands will not come apart again. 開放 here has its plain old sense, "to come open" - so the reverent gesture and the handcuff turn out to be the same shape.

To this day there remains the pose called the Guanyin clasp, and this is the meaning of it.

The 觀音扭, the "Guanyin clasp," is a real devotional hand-pose. The line offers a straight-faced explanation of where it came from, which is the novel's favourite trick: attach a genuine piece of religious practice to a joke and let the reader decide.

The boy, unable to part his hands or to take up his spear, knew at last how deep and subtle was her power; and having no help for it, he bowed his head to the ground in obeisance.

He cannot open his hands, cannot pick up his spear, and gives in. 開不得 and 拿不得 slip a small 得 inside the verb, and it is unstressed de, not the full verb dé. That inserted syllable means "cannot," not "must not" - he is not forbidden to lift the spear, he is simply unable.