"Look at it — it is rather:"

The line ends on a colon and stops. That is the cue: whenever a character says look at that and then breaks off, verse is coming, and the building is about to be described in a set piece rather than a sentence.

倒也 — it is rather — is the everyday adverb of concession, the same one used a moment ago when the narrator admitted they had covered a good deal of ground. Tripitaka is being mildly impressed and slightly grudging about it.

"Not small and not large, yet it has glazed tiles of green;"

The set-piece — a rhapsody, meaning a long, unrhymed run of matched pairs of lines — opens by refusing to commit. Not small, not large. Chinese descriptive verse often works by pairing opposites like this, and the effect is a building that will not quite come into focus — which suits a temple about to turn out to be somewhere else entirely.

琉璃碧瓦 — glazed tiles of green — is a mark of money and rank. Roof tiles were regulated, and coloured glaze was not for ordinary buildings.

"half new and half old, yet it has an eight-fold wall of red."

The 八字紅牆 is the flared screen wall outside a formal gate, splayed at both ends so that seen from above it makes the shape of the character for eight. The name describes the plan, not the size.

Half new and half old answers not small and not large, clause for clause. This kind of matched pairing is the backbone of the form.

"Faintly one sees the ancient pines with their canopies spread, and there is no telling how many hundreds or thousands of years those relics have stood to this day;"

隱隱 — a doubled sound for something half-glimpsed. Its partner arrives in the next line, doubled for something half-heard.

The line ends on an admission: nobody knows how old any of this is. Hold that thought. The abbot will shortly know exactly how old it is, and date it to an event in the Buddha's own lifetime.

"softly one hears the running water sounding its strings, and no one says which dynasty it was that first opened this hill and left it standing."

潺潺 answers 隱隱 across the pair, sound against sight.

鳴絃 — sounding its strings — makes the stream a zither. It is an old comparison and a worn one, and the novel is using it on purpose: this is the sort of thing temple poems say.

And again the same admission — nobody says who founded it. Two long lines, two shrugs. The verse is being careful not to tell you what the signboard is about to give away.

"On the mountain gate, written large: Gold-Spread Chan Monastery;"

布金 means gold spread out, and the name is the whole plot of this half of the chapter. Nobody in the party has worked it out yet.

著 marks a state that goes on holding — the writing stays written. It turns up twenty-two times in this chapter, in two quite different jobs: this one, and the one that marks an action landing on its target, as when the ball hits the monk later on.

"on the hanging board, left inscribed: Relic of High Antiquity."

The verse ends by simply reading out a second sign, which is lovely timing — after all that atmosphere, the information arrives as plain lettering on a board.

上古遺跡 — a relic of high antiquity. The temple is advertising its own age without saying what happened here, which is exactly what the two long lines just did.

Pilgrim read it as Gold-Spread Chan Monastery, and Eight Rules also said it was Gold-Spread Chan Monastery. Tripitaka, on his horse, fell to thinking, and said, "Gold-spread... gold-spread... can this be the borders of Shravasti?"

Both disciples read the sign correctly and neither of them hears anything in it. Tripitaka repeats the two characters to himself twice, with a pause each time, and gets there.

舍衛 is Shravasti, the city in northern India where the Buddha spent more rainy seasons than anywhere else. The connection Tripitaka is groping toward is one of the most famous stories in the whole tradition, and he is about to tell it.

The edition marks the repeated name with its inner quotation marks and sets an ellipsis on either side of the second one. This is the only sentence in the chapter that carries both, and the pauses are doing the same work as a long look into the middle distance.