三百餘年 Three Hundred Years Indoors
我與那廝賭鬥，他就放金光罩住我，是我使神通走脫了。聞菩薩能滅他的金光，特來拜請。」菩薩道：「是誰與你說的？我自赴了盂蘭會，到今三百餘年，不曾出門。我与那厮赌斗，他就放金光罩住我，是我使神通走脱了。闻菩萨能灭他的金光，特来拜请。」菩萨道：「是谁与你说的？我自赴了盂兰会，到今三百余年，不曾出门。
逐句解 Line by line
"I fought the fellow, and he loosed a golden light and clapped it over me, and I got away by working my magic."
罩住 — clapped over and held — is the fourth and last time the chapter uses 罩 of the golden light, after 罩人, 罩得十餘里 and 罩定. Add the 金桶 and 銅鐘 of the verse and every description of the thing has been an image of something put OVER you, never of something that strikes.
"I heard that the bodhisattva can put out his golden light, and so I have come expressly to beg her help."
滅 is to extinguish, the verb for putting out a fire or a lamp — and it is the right verb, because the thing is light. 特來 is to come expressly, for this and nothing else. He does not say who told him, which is the one instruction the Old Mother left him with.
"Who told you this?" said the bodhisattva.
Nine characters, and it is the exact question he was warned about. She asks it first, before agreeing to anything.
"Since I attended the Ullambana assembly I have not been out of doors for more than three hundred years."
盂蘭會 is the Ullambana assembly — the festival, still kept across East Asia in the seventh lunar month, at which offerings are made to release the dead from suffering. Its founding story is Maudgalyayana rescuing his mother from a hell of hunger, which makes it the one Buddhist feast that is about a child getting a parent out of trouble. She has been indoors ever since. 不曾 comes out as céng unaided, as it does at every one of its occurrences in this chapter.
Her first question is the one he has been forbidden to answer, and she asks it before she asks anything else. That tells you the Old Mother's warning was not fussiness — there is history here, and Vairambha wants to know who has been talking about her before she agrees to leave the house.
And what a house-leaving it would be. Three hundred years and more since she last went out, by her own account, and the last occasion was a religious assembly. She is not a recluse by temperament so much as somebody who has arranged her life so that nothing needs her.
The 盂蘭會 is worth knowing about, because the novel does not choose its festivals at random. Ullambana is the feast of Maudgalyayana descending to hell to feed his starving mother — the one occasion in the Buddhist calendar built entirely around rescuing somebody who cannot rescue themselves. The last time she left home, it was for that. She is about to leave home again.