Truly time speeds swiftly: before he knew it, seven times seven made forty-nine days, and Laozi's fire-cycle was complete. Of a sudden, one day, the brazier was opened to take out the elixir.

火候 (huǒ hòu) is fire-timing — the exact schedule of heats an alchemist has to hit, and one of the trade's core terms. It survives in ordinary Chinese as the word for a knack or a sense of timing: a cook has 火候. Seven times seven, 七七, makes forty-nine days, an interval loaded with meaning in both Buddhist and Daoist reckoning. Laozi opens up expecting ash and elixir. He gets neither.

The Great Sage, both hands shielding his eyes, was just then rubbing them and weeping, when he heard a sound at the brazier's mouth.

侮著 takes 著 as zhe, the ending for something still going on — hands still over the eyes while he does it. The staging is almost comic: the most dangerous creature in Heaven caught mid eye-rub, weeping from the smoke.

Suddenly opening his eyes, he saw the light; unable to hold back, he flexed his body in a single bound, leapt out of the elixir-brazier, and with a clattering crash kicked the Eight-Trigram Brazier over and made straight for the door.

將身一縱 uses 將 as jiāng again; 一縱 takes yí before zòng, falling tone. In 唿喇一聲 — a clatter, a crash — 一 takes yì before shēng, level tone. The furnace built to destroy him ends the sentence on its side.

In a fluster the fire-stokers, brazier-tenders and the Ding-Jia crew rushed to seize him — and one by one he knocked them all flat, like a white-browed tiger gone epileptic, like a wind-mad single-horned dragon.

一班 takes yì before bān (level tone); 一個個 takes yí before gè (falling). 好似 keeps 似 as sì, to resemble. The two beasts he is likened to — 白額虎, the white-browed tiger, and 獨角龍, the one-horned dragon — are picked less for menace than for being past controlling. His rage has stopped being a person's and become weather.

Laozi gave chase and grabbed at him — but with one wrench the monkey threw him head-over-heels, and slipped free.

一把 takes yì before bǎ (dipping tone), 一捽 the same before zuó (rising); 捽 (zuó) is to wrench or yank. Then the phrase everyone enjoys: 倒栽蔥, planted upside down like a spring onion, head in the soil and legs in the air. It is still the ordinary Chinese for going head over heels — and the man taking the fall here is the Lord of the Way himself.

At once he drew the As-You-Will cudgel from his ear; facing the wind he gave it a shake, and it grew bowl-thick as before, gripped firm in his hand. Heedless of good or ill, once more he threw the Palace of Heaven into uproar, beating the Nine Luminary Stars behind barred doors and the Four Heavenly Kings into formless flight. A fine monkey-sprite! There is a poem to prove it. The poem says:

如意棒 is the As-You-Will cudgel: it becomes whatever size he has in mind. 幌一幌 is the verb-一-verb pattern, the quick informal move that English makes with just — just give it a shake; 一 before 幌 (huǎng, dipping tone) is yì. The lead-in 詩曰 sits at the end of this prose run, and three sets of verse follow.

His Primal-Unity body squares true with the Before-Heaven; through ten thousand kalpas, a thousand turns, it is only Self-So.

混元 (hùn yuán) is the state before anything had been separated out from anything else; 先天 (xiān tiān) is Before-Heaven, the uncreated prior condition. 自然 (zì rán) here is not nature in our sense but Self-So: what is the way it is without having been made so. Three terms, and the poem has quietly promoted a monkey into a principle older than creation.

Vague and boundless, doing-nothing, one with the Great Monad; Thus-and-Thus, unmoving, it is named First Mystery.

無為 (wú wéi) is non-action, the Daoist knack of getting things done by not forcing them; 太乙 is Tài Yǐ, the Great Monad. 如如不動 comes from the other tradition entirely — tathatā, suchness, unmoving. Two vocabularies inside one couplet, which is how the whole chapter works.

Long refined in the brazier, yet no lead and mercury; beyond all things, deathless — this is the root-immortal.

鉛汞 (qiān gǒng), lead and mercury, are the two working substances of laboratory alchemy — the outer kind, done in a furnace. The line insists his deathlessness is not that sort: he is 本仙, immortal from the root, not immortal by treatment. 長生 keeps 長 as cháng, long life.

Transformations without end, and still he transforms; of the Three Refuges and Five Precepts, say nothing at all.

三皈五戒 (sān guī wǔ jiè) are the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts — the basic vows a Buddhist lay follower takes, roughly the terms of membership. 還變化 keeps 還 as hái, still or again. And the poem's last word on those vows is: do not mention them. He is entirely unconverted, which is the condition the chapter exists to correct.

Another poem: A single point of numinous light pierces the Great Void; that staff of his is likewise so.

一點靈光 (yì diǎn líng guāng) is one point of numinous light, the spark of awareness; 一 before 點 (diǎn, dipping tone) is yì. 太虛 is the Great Void. The second line then says the iron cudgel is the same sort of thing as that spark — which turns the weapon into a picture of mind: no fixed shape, fitting whatever it is put to.

Now long, now short, used as one wills; crosswise or upright, ranged at will, free to furl or unfurl.

或長或短 keeps 長 as cháng, long. 卷舒 (juǎn shū) is furling and unfurling, the way a scroll rolls shut and opens. A cudgel that takes its size from its owner's intention is, in the alchemical reading, a picture of a trained will: one instrument for every situation, because it fits itself to each.

Another poem: The ape-and-monkey, body of the Way, is matched to the human mind; the mind is the ape-and-monkey — the meaning runs deep.

Here is the chapter's argument stated flat out: 心即猿猴, the mind is the ape. Readers sometimes take the 心猿 equation for a clever gloss invented by later commentators. It is not. It is written into the poem. 道體, body of the Way, goes further still and makes the monkey the actual substance of a mind under training.

"Great Sage Equal to Heaven" is no empty boast; but the post of Bì-mǎ — how could that know his true note?

弼馬 is Bì mǎ, Keeper of the Horses — the humiliating post Heaven fobbed him off with in chapter 4, in plain terms a stablehand. 知音 is the lovely one: the person who knows the tune. It comes from the tale of a lute player who smashed his instrument when the one man who understood his playing died, and it still means the person who truly gets you. Heaven gave him a job that understood nothing about him. The title fitted; the office insulted. That is the grievance the whole revolt runs on.

Horse and ape working as one, mind in accord with intent; bind them fast and tether them tight — seek not outside.

馬猿 (mǎ yuán) folds two stock images together: 意馬, the horse of the will, bolting, and 心猿, the monkey of the mind, swinging. Set side by side they make the idiom that is still ordinary Chinese for a head that will not settle. The advice that follows is blunt and practical: tie them up, and stop looking for the answer somewhere outside yourself.

Let the ten thousand forms return to the true, following the single principle; one in tally with the Tathāgata, dwelling in the Twin Groves.

萬相 keeps 相 as xiàng, forms or appearances. In 從一理, 一 before 理 (lǐ, dipping tone) is yì: the one principle. 雙林 is Shuāng lín, the twin sāla groves where the Buddha passed into nirvāṇa. So the verse ends by looking straight past the rampage in progress to the meeting with the Buddha that will close the chapter.