The king thereupon granted the request and said, "Where are your disciples?" Tripitaka said, "They are all at the Bureau of Common Reception."

The whole plan turns on this exchange and it takes eleven characters. The king says yes without thinking about it, because nothing could be more natural than letting a man speak to his servants before his wedding.

准奏 — granted the request, the formal word for a throne approving a petition. The door is open.

He at once dispatched an officer to summon the holy monk's disciples to receive the rescript and go west, leaving the holy monk here to be consort. The elder could only rise and stand in attendance.

差官 — dispatched an officer. The character is read chāi, to send on official business; the chapter uses it this way nine times against two in the quite separate sense of being wrong.

為駙馬 — to be consort. The reading here is the one meaning to be or to serve as.

只得起身侍立 — could only rise and stand in attendance. Tripitaka is now a fixture of the court, standing while others sit. The novel gives him one small dignity and takes it away in the same clause.

There is a poem to prove it:

有詩為證 — there is a poem to prove it. The most formal of the chapter's verse cues, and the one that signals the narrator is about to comment rather than describe.

What follows is eight lines of seven characters, printed two to a line, and it is the moral of the whole chapter delivered straight to the reader.

"The great elixir does not leak, and needs all three entire; the bitter discipline is hard to bring off, and one resents an evil bond."

大丹不漏 — the great elixir does not leak. Inner alchemy held that the body's three treasures must be kept whole and unspent; a leak is any loss of them, and sexual loss most of all. That is exactly what the false princess is after, so the poem is naming the danger in technical language.

三全 — all three entire. The three are essence, breath and spirit, the trio that inner alchemy works on.

惡緣 — an evil bond. The word for a karmic connection, with the adjective that turns it bad. The princess called their meeting a bond from a former life; the poem agrees it is a bond and disagrees about the rest.

"The Way lies in the sages' transmission, the practice lies in oneself; good comes of a man's accumulating, and blessing comes of heaven."

道在聖傳修在己 — the Way lies in the sages' handing-on, the practice lies in oneself. A balanced line, and it is the same argument Pilgrim and Tripitaka had at the start of the chapter: you can be given the text, but nobody can do the work for you.

善由人積福由天 — good comes of a man's accumulating, blessing comes of heaven. The division of labour is precise. You are responsible for the merit; the reward is not yours to arrange.

"Do not indulge the six roots with their many cravings; break open at once the one nature, the original source. Without love and without longing, one is clean of itself; and that will surely bring release and let you rise beyond."

六根 — the six roots: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind, the six gates through which everything reaches us. Indulging them is the standing Buddhist diagnosis of what goes wrong.

頓開 — break open at once. The word for sudden awakening, as against the gradual sort, and the two schools argued about it for centuries.

解脫得超然 — release, and rising beyond. The middle character links the release to the state it produces.

The poem's last word on the matter is that the cure for an unwanted marriage is to want nothing. It is cold comfort for a man standing in a throne room, and the chapter offers it without apology.