"Have the gate opened at once." What they saw was a patch of empty ground with some footings of piled broken stone.

空地 — empty ground. The character is read kòng here, meaning vacant or unoccupied, not the {em('kōng')} of the emptiness in the Heart Scripture. Same character, quite different word, and this chapter uses both.

碎石疊的牆腳 — a wall-footing of piled broken stone. That is all that is left. The signboard that started all this was eleven hundred and seventy characters ago, and the payoff runs to sixteen.

The line ending in a colon is the cue: verse follows.

Tripitaka put his palms together and sighed:

合掌 — palms together — is the gesture made before speaking of something holy, and it is also just what a tired man does when he has been shown a field.

The line ends on a colon and stops, which is the cue. What follows is a quatrain — four lines of seven characters each, the standard shape for a poem of this kind.

"I remember of old the almsgiver Sudatta, who once took gold and treasure to relieve the poor and sick."

檀那 transcribes the Sanskrit for a giver of alms — the word behind the English patron in its older sense, a supporter of a religious house.

須達多 is Sudatta, which was the Elder's actual name. His charity earned him the Friendless nickname everyone knows him by, and Tripitaka, being a scholar, uses the real one.

貧痾 — the poor and the sick — is a compressed pair of the sort verse likes: one character for poverty, one for illness, and no verb between them.

"Jetavana has left its name here for a thousand ages; but in what quarter is the Elder now, and who keeps him company?"

伴覺羅 — keeping company with the awakened. The question is whether the Elder, having given everything away, is now where the Buddha is.

The quatrain's shape is worth hearing: the first two lines look back at what the man did, the third says the name survives, and the fourth asks whether the man does. It is a question, and nobody answers it.

⚠ 祗園 is spelled here with the character used six times in this chapter, and not with the one used at the abbot's explanation a page earlier. The two differ by a single stroke and stand for the same Indian name.

They were all enjoying the moon, and walked on slowly.

玩著月 — enjoying the moon. Here the busy character marks something that keeps going on: they are still enjoying it as they walk. The chapter has used it the other way twice already in these few pages.

One short prose line after the quatrain, and the mood is handed straight back to the evening. This is the novel's usual way out of verse — no comment, no reaction, just the party moving off.

Drawing near the outside of the back gate, they came to a terrace and sat a while, when suddenly they heard the sound of weeping. Tripitaka listened quietly and carefully; what was being wept were words of pain that a mother and father could not know of. He was moved to the heart and, without noticing it, let his tears fall, and turned to ask the monks, "Who is that, and where, grieving so?"

靜心誠聽 — stilled his heart and listened in earnest. Four characters, and it is the same quality of attention he was accused of lacking in the argument about the Heart Scripture nearly fourteen hundred characters ago. He is better at listening than at explaining.

不覺淚墮 — without noticing it, his tears fell. Tripitaka weeps easily and the novel usually makes it comic. Not here.

是甚人在何處悲切 — who is that, and where, grieving so. The question that opens the second half of the chapter.