The Bodhisattva led the company inside; her courtesies to the Jade Emperor completed, she greeted Lord Lao and the Queen Mother as well, and all took their seats.

禮畢, the courtesies completed. Business in the celestial court waits on the full round of formal greetings, exactly as it would in a mortal palace.

Then she asked, "How fared the Grand Festival of Immortal Peaches?"

Guanyin does not open with pleasantries. Her first question goes straight to the wrecked feast — this is the 問原因, the asking of the cause, that the chapter title promises.

Said the Jade Emperor, "Every year the feast is held in joy and gladness; but this year it was thrown into chaos by the fiendish monkey — the invitations went out quite in vain."

虛邀 means invited to no purpose. The guests all came; there was simply nothing for them to come to.

Said the Bodhisattva, "And where does this fiendish monkey come from?"

出處 is where a thing comes from, its provenance. The question is the cue for the Jade Emperor's full recital of the monkey's career — which is also the novel's way of catching up any reader who has come in late.

Said the Jade Emperor, "The fiendish monkey was hatched from a stone egg on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, in the Land of Aolai, in the Eastern Pūrvavideha Continent.

東勝神洲 is the eastern of the four continents of Buddhist cosmology, Pūrvavideha in Sanskrit. A textual point worth having: the canonical Buddhist name writes 東勝身洲 with 身, body, but this edition prints 神, spirit — hence Eastern Continent of Superior Spirit, and note that 勝 here carries its sense of superior or excellent rather than victorious. 傲來國 and 花果山 are the monkey's homeland, laid out in Chapter 1.

At his birth his eyes flashed a golden light that shot up to the mansion of the Dipper.

The beam from a newborn's eyes is what first put Heaven on notice. 斗府 is the celestial office of the Northern Dipper (北斗, where 斗 is read dǒu) — so the light shot straight into an administrative department, which is very much this novel's idea of a portent. The episode is told in Chapter 1.

At first We paid it no mind; but then he became a spirit — subduing dragons, taming tigers, and striking his own name from the registers of death.

The Emperor speaks throughout in 朕, the imperial We. 降龍伏虎 (xiáng lóng fú hǔ), subduing dragons and taming tigers, is a set phrase for overwhelming power — still the going idiom for someone who can handle anything. 自削死籍 recalls Chapter 3, where the monkey walked into the underworld and struck his own name out of King Yama's ledger, making himself deathless by clerical vandalism.

At that the Dragon Kings and King Yama submitted memorials against him.

Both plaintiffs had cause. 閻王 is King Yama, lord of the dead, whose register the monkey defaced; the 龍王, the Dragon Kings, are the ones he extorted his iron cudgel from. Wronged parties in this cosmos do not take revenge — they file memorials.

We wished to have him seized, but the Star of Chang'geng submitted, saying, 'Among the Three Realms, any creature possessed of nine apertures may attain immortality.'

長庚星, the Star of Chang'geng (cháng gēng), is the Evening Star, Venus — also called 太白金星, the Gold Star, and Heaven's standing advocate of talking things out. His argument rests on 九竅, the nine apertures, the classical count of the openings of the body: any creature so equipped has a natural claim to cultivate the Way, so why not enrol this one rather than fight him?

So We extended instruction and nurtured his worth: We summoned him to the upper realm and appointed him an officer of the Imperial Stables — a Bimawen.

御馬監, the Directorate of the Imperial Stud (監 here is jiàn, a directorate), was a real office of the Ming palace eunuchs — the joke lands harder for a reader who knows the bureau exists. 弼馬溫, Bimawen, is roughly Keeper of the Horses, the deliberately trivial post handed to the monkey in Chapter 4, and thereafter the one insult he cannot bear to hear.

But the fellow, resenting the lowliness of the post, rose in revolt against the Heavenly Palace.

那廝, that fellow, is a contemptuous way of pointing at someone, and it sets the Emperor's tone for the whole speech. 嫌惡 (xián wù) is to loathe or resent: the moment the monkey learned his rank was the lowest in Heaven, he walked off the job.

We at once dispatched Heavenly King Li and Prince Nezha to subdue him; then We sent down a decree of pardon to mollify him, and summoned him back to the upper realm,

李天王, Heavenly King Li the pagoda-bearer, and his son 哪吒 (Nezha) led the first failed expedition in Chapter 4. Watch 降 do two different jobs in one sentence: 收降 is xiáng, to subdue, while 降詔 is jiàng, to send down a decree. Force first, then paperwork. (The god's name is read here by the modern standard, Nézhā.)

and enfeoffed him as Great Sage Equal to Heaven — though it was a rank with title but no stipend.

齊天大聖, Great Sage Equal to Heaven, is the grand-sounding title the monkey demanded and got. 有官無祿 — office without emolument — is the catch: a post with rank and no salary, designed to flatter him without giving him anything. Anyone who has been promoted sideways will recognise the manoeuvre.

Having no duties to occupy him, he roamed east and idled west.

東遊西蕩, rambling east and drifting west. The dangerous thing about the Great Sage turns out not to be his powers but his empty diary.

Fearing he might breed fresh trouble, We then set him to oversee the Garden of Immortal Peaches.

A fateful appointment: the very emblem of undisciplined appetite is put in charge of the fruit of immortality. The verb 著 here is zhuó, to assign, to order someone to do a thing.

But he kept no rule of law: the great peaches on the oldest trees he stole and devoured, every one.

盡行偷吃, ate the lot (盡 is jìn, entirely). Chapter 5 tells it: the oldest trees bore the most potent peaches, ripening once every nine thousand years, and he worked through them.

And when the feast was arranged, being an officer without stipend, he was not among those invited.

無祿人員, a salary-less functionary. Here is the slight that detonates the whole catastrophe — the guest list was drawn up by rank, he had none that counted, and he was left off it.

So he laid a scheme and gulled the Barefoot Immortal, then changed himself into that Immortal's likeness to enter the feast,

賺哄 is to dupe or trick. The monkey sent the Barefoot Immortal off on a fool's errand and then wore his face into the banquet. 變…相貌, changing his appearance, is the first of this chapter's very many transformations.

stole and ate up all the immortal viands and wine, filched Lord Lao's elixir of immortality, and made off with a quantity of the imperial liquor besides,

仙殽, immortal viands — 殽 is a variant of 肴, cooked food, read yáo. Of everything on this charge sheet, the theft of 老君仙丹, Lord Lao's elixir, is the one that matters most: it is why the monkey's body is now proof against destruction, as the next chapter will discover the hard way.

and carried it all back to share in revelry with the monkeys of his own mountain.

享樂, to feast and make merry. The treasures of Heaven end their journey as a party for a troop of monkeys on Flower-Fruit Mountain.

For all this Our heart is sorely vexed, and so We have marshalled a hundred thousand heavenly soldiers, with Heaven-and-Earth nets, to take him.

天羅地網, nets of Heaven and snares of Earth, is the encircling cordon thrown round Flower-Fruit Mountain — the phrase survives in modern Chinese for a dragnet nobody slips. 十萬天兵, the hundred thousand, is the full mobilisation of Chapter 5.

This whole day no report has come back, and We do not know how the battle has gone."

The recital ends on suspense rather than resolution — which is precisely what has drawn Guanyin to court, and what will move her to propose a champion of her own.