Next day the king gave orders again, and threw open a great vegetarian feast.

素宴 is a meatless banquet, which matters for what happens two segments later. The court is feeding its Buddhist guests properly while it decides what to do with seven lion carcasses.

The officials of the whole prefecture, great and small, gave their thanks one by one.

一一 here means each in turn, and it is the second time this chapter has used the doubled character. It is also the one that behaves ordinarily: because the character that follows carries a falling tone, both syllables settle the same way whichever order you work them out in. The other, later in the chapter, does not.

Pilgrim then called for butchers and had the six live lions killed, and along with the Yellow Lion had them all skinned, and the meat prepared and brought in to be enjoyed.

The turn is abrupt even by this book's standards. The line before was a meatless banquet; this one is a slaughter order given by a Buddhist pilgrim. 受用 is to have the enjoyment of something, and it is the same word used for the benefits of religious merit.

His highness was delighted, and gave the order at once: one was to be kept for the use of the household within and without;

The king's response to seven dead lions is a distribution schedule. He is a competent administrator and the chapter has shown him almost nothing else.

one to be shared among the Chief Clerk and the other officers of the princely household;

長史 is a real post of the old empire, the senior secretary of a princely establishment - roughly a chief of staff. 長 takes zhǎng in it, the seniority reading.

and five to be chopped into pieces of an ounce or two apiece, and dispatched by officers to be handed out to the soldiers and townsfolk within the prefecture city and without, for each to eat a little: first, that they might have a taste of it, and second, to press down their fright.

The best sentence in the chapter's closing stretch. 差 is chāi here, dispatching men on an errand, not the chà of amiss. And 押押驚恐 is the phrase to keep: to press down, to weigh flat, the terror. A whole city has spent two days watching lions carry off its royal family, and the official remedy is that everybody gets an ounce of lion to eat.

And in every house and every family there was not one who did not look up in reverence.

家家戶戶 - house by house, door by door - is still the everyday Chinese for throughout the population. The reverence is being paid to the monks, over a meal of the thing that frightened them.

Then they saw the smiths and the rest, who had finished making the three weapons, come and knock their heads before Pilgrim, saying: "Grandfather, we little ones have finished the work."

The smiths were the first people in the previous chapter, waking to find the weapons gone. Here they are again, at the end of this one, with the job done. The whole disaster fits between their two appearances.