好所在 What a Fine Place
大聖卻收了金箍棒，停步看時，好所在：大圣却收了金箍棒，停步看时，好所在：
逐句解 Line by line
The Great Sage put up his gold-hooped cudgel, halted his step and looked. A fine place it was:
The chapter's third scene-setting tag, and the third to be a descriptive flourish rather than one of the fixed formulas. Like the two before it, it rides at the end of a line of prose instead of standing alone.
The groves stand thick and dark; the cliffs are sheer and jagged.
削 is xuē, of a cliff cut as if with a knife. 崚嶒 is a pair of syllables meaning jagged and uneven.
The fig-vine and the dodder cast a slow-drifting shade; orchid and iris breathe a lingering sweetness.
薜蘿 is the vine-and-creeper pairing that has been clothing the mountain hermit's retreat in Chinese poetry ever since the Chu ci. 冉冉 and 馨馨 are both doubled syllables — slow-drifting, lingering-sweet.
The running spring rinses jade as it threads the tall bamboo; the artful rocks, knowing the season, carry the fallen blossom.
漱玉 is water sounding over stone, as though rinsing jade. 知機 credits the rocks with discernment: they catch the falling petals at exactly the right moment.
Mist and rosy cloud enshroud the far summits; sun and moon light the screen of cloud.
籠 is lóng. The reading looks wrong to a modern eye, which expects lǒng for the verb, but 康熙 files the sense of enveloping under 盧紅切 and keeps 力董切 for the noun 箱籠, a chest. The poets read it lóng throughout.
Dragons intone and tigers roar; cranes cry out and orioles sing.
Four beats, four creatures, each with the sound proper to it. The dragon and tiger here answer the dragon's pool and tiger's den of the first set-piece a few passages back.
One whole reach of clear seclusion, and truly to be loved; with jasper flowers and jade grasses the prospect is bright without end.
琪花瑤草 are the jasper flowers and jade grasses that grow in the country of the immortals. 一 shifts to yí before the falling tone of 片.
It yields nothing to the immortal grottoes of Tiantai, and surpasses Penglai and Yingzhou upon the sea.
天臺 is the mountain in Zhejiang where Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao were said to have met immortal women and lost half a lifetime doing it. 蓬瀛 abbreviates Penglai and Yingzhou, two of the three isles of the blessed. 不 takes bú before the falling tone of 亞.
The third set-piece of the chapter describes the approach to a demon's cave, and every term in it comes from the vocabulary of the immortal's grotto. Fig-vine and dodder, jasper flowers and jade grasses, the caves of Tiantai, the isles of Penglai and Yingzhou — the place is furnished exactly as a paradise would be, and the last couplet claims outright that it beats the originals.
That is not idle decoration. The novel consistently gives its demons excellent property, and the effect is to unsettle any assumption that beautiful scenery means a benevolent owner. Behind the slammed door is a woman who bought her husband and a bull who walked out on his wife. The poem tells the truth about the landscape and nothing whatever about the household.
Its placement is the joke. The Great Sage has just chased a terrified woman through the pines, bellowing, and had the door shut in his face. He puts his cudgel away, stops, and the narrative pauses for a dozen lines of ornate landscape verse before anything else happens. The pause is the point. He has nothing to do but look at the view.