They had barely got inside the second gate when the great hall of the Tathāgata came into view.

The building is laid out exactly as a great monastery should be, outer gate and inner, and the description gives the reader no grounds for suspicion at all. 方…就… is the everyday frame for one thing following hard on another: barely inside, and there it was.

Outside the hall door, below the jewelled terrace, were ranged five hundred arhats, three thousand guardians, four vajra-kings, eight bodhisattvas, nuns and laymen, and holy monks and adepts beyond counting.

Every rank of the Buddhist establishment, in the correct order and the correct numbers. 優婆塞 is the layman, upāsaka, and its last graph reads sāi — the Kāngxī dictionary files the word by name inside its 蘇則切 entry, 又伊蒲塞，卽優婆塞, and that spelling comes down into modern speech two ways, a literary one and a colloquial one. The transcription took the colloquial. It is the same graph the chapter read sè at 頂天塞空, where the sense was filling a gap.

Truly the incense and flowers were gorgeous and the auspicious vapours thick.

真個也 is the storyteller's own voice vouching for the scene, and he is not lying — the flowers really are there. That makes four times now that the chapter has described this place favourably in its own voice: the glow seen from the ridge, the long poem at the gate, the roll of the assembly, and this.

In his fluster the elder, with Eight Rules and Sha Monk, bowed at every step, bowing his way right up to the numinous terrace.

一步一拜 is the full pilgrim's prostration, one bow to every pace, the way a devout traveller covers the last stretch to a holy site. It is being spent on a fake. 得 is de here, linking the fluster to what it produced — the opposite job from the 聽得 a moment ago.

Pilgrim openly did not bow.

Six graphs, and 公然 carries all of them: not that he failed to bow but that he declined to, in plain view of everybody. It is the only unit in this whole stretch that reports a decision rather than an event.