滿天縹緲 Auspicious Cloud Parting Overhead
二菩薩相隨左右，同眾飛空。只見那：二菩萨相随左右，同众飞空。只见那：
逐句解 Line by line
The two Bodhisattvas went along on either side, and the whole company flew up into the air.
相隨 takes xiāng, the mutual reading — attending on one another, one at each side.
And this was the sight:
Three characters and a colon: the storyteller's signal that verse is coming, and it is never separated from the poem it introduces.
Filling the sky, faint and far, the auspicious clouds divide; our Buddha in his mercy sends the dharma-gate down.
降 is jiàng here, to send down — not the xiáng of subduing a demon, which is the reading it takes almost everywhere else in this book. 法門, the dharma-gate, is a way of teaching or a means of entry to the truth.
Plainly he shows the principle by which Heaven opened and things were born; in fine words he sets out the writing by which Earth was parted and bodies transformed.
The couplet is summarising the genealogy the Buddha has just recited, which is how these interpolated poems usually work — they restate what has happened in a higher register.
Before him, five hundred Arhats; behind his head, three thousand Jieti gods.
The 揭諦 are guardian spirits whose name transcribes the Sanskrit gate of the Heart Sutra's closing mantra — a word from a spell turned into a class of deity. Five hundred and three thousand are the traditional figures.
Kasyapa and Ananda at his left and right; the Bodhisattvas Samantabhadra and Manjushri wiping out the demon vapours.
普文 abbreviates the two Bodhisattvas' names to one character each, which is what verse does when the line will not hold them. 殄 is to exterminate.
The poem is a procession piece, and its job is to make you see the scale of what is now moving toward Lion Camel City. Five hundred Arhats, three thousand guardian gods, four named attendants and the Buddha in the middle.
Notice what the middle couplet does. It restates the cosmology from the throne room — heaven opening, earth parting, bodies transformed — so that the genealogy and the rescue become one continuous act. The Buddha explains where the roc came from and then goes to collect him.
And the last word is the giveaway. Demon vapours: not demons but the miasma they give off, a sickness in the air. The novel keeps describing this campaign as sanitation.