Precious towers, stately and fine; a jewelled throne, lofty and steep.

A rhapsody opens the way a camera opens: wide, before anything moves. Four characters and four characters, balanced against each other, and no verb between them. 崢嶸 normally describes a mountain — craggy, towering — so applying it to the buddha's seat makes the furniture geological. The whole of what follows is built in matched pairs like this, which is the form's signature: a place described by being weighed against itself.

The Buddha hall rises high beyond the clouds; the monks' quarters lie quiet in the moonlight.

High against quiet, cloud against moon, and the two lines are the same shape to the character. Note what the pair is doing: it puts the public building and the private one side by side, so you get the whole establishment in ten characters. The 僧房, the monks' cells, are where the pilgrims are about to be given very comfortable beds.

Cinnabar mists hang faint where the stupa stands; among dark-green trees, deep in shade, the revolving canon is bright.

Two pieces of temple furniture, both worth knowing. 浮屠 is a stupa or pagoda, and the word is a very old Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit buddha — the same syllables that gave us the word Buddha reached China and ended up naming the building instead. And 輪藏 is a revolving sutra repository: a great rotating bookcase holding the Buddhist canon, invented so that a layman who could not read could turn the whole library once and earn the merit of having read it. A prayer wheel the size of a room. The reading matters here — 藏 is zàng, a canon or treasury, not cáng, to hide. Same character, and the automatic reading takes the wrong one.

A true Pure Land, a counterfeit Dragon Palace — above the Hall of the Great Hero, purple clouds gather close.

The line pulls a small trick and then moves on as if it hadn't. 真淨土 against 假龍宮: a genuine Pure Land, a sham Dragon Palace. It means the place is as splendid as the dragon king's undersea court without actually being it — but 假, false, is a loaded word to leave lying about in a chapter whose whole plot turns on counterfeit divinity. 大雄殿 is the main hall of any Chinese Buddhist temple; 大雄, Great Hero, is a standing epithet of the Buddha.

Along both galleries the idlers at their games never thin out; the one pagoda stands always open for visitors to climb.

And here the rhapsody quietly hands the plot its next move. 一塔常開有客登 — the pagoda is always open and people go up it. Hold that thought. Two passages from now Tripitaka will announce that he has a standing vow to sweep a pagoda, and this line has already told you there is one on the premises with the door unlocked. The galleries full of loafers are a nice touch too: a working temple with people hanging about in it, not a hushed sanctuary.

In the censer the incense burns hour upon hour; on the stand the lamp-flowers glimmer night after night.

Two doubled phrases in one couplet — 時時 and 夜夜 — which is how Chinese verse says "continually" without using the word. 燈花, a lamp-flower, is the little bloom of charred wick that forms on an oil lamp as it burns; seeing one was traditionally a sign of luck coming. This is the first lamp in a chapter that is going to be about very little else.

Suddenly from the abbot's quarters comes the note of a golden bell, and monks answering the Buddha chant the sutras aloud.

The rhapsody ends on sound, having begun on architecture — and on the one thing in the passage that actually moves. 方丈 is the abbot's quarters, literally "ten feet square," from the size of the cell the layman Vimalakīrti is said to have received a whole assembly in; Chinese still uses it for the abbot himself. 應 is yìng here, to answer or respond to — the monks are chanting in answer to the bell, not because they ought to.