"My immortal root was a piece of mutton-fat jade, / ground and polished into shape through years past counting."

The boast begins where these boasts always begin: with the raw material. 羊脂玉 is mutton-fat jade, the most prized grade of white nephrite — dense, warm, faintly translucent, the colour of rendered fat. It is the jade reserved for imperial ritual objects, and naming it in the first line is her answer to nobody knows what it is. ⚠ 琢 reads zhuó, the cutting and grinding of jade. The other reading of this character belongs to a colloquial word for mulling something over, which is not what is happening to a piece of stone.

"When Chaos was first opened, I was already in being; / when the Primal Murk was parted, I came before it."

She now claims to predate the universe, which is the standard opening bid for a weapon of consequence in this book. Wukong's own rod makes a similar claim. 混沌 is Chaos, the undifferentiated state before heaven and earth separated. 洪濛 is the Primal Murk, the same condition under another name. Chinese cosmology has several words for the state before things had edges, and rhapsody likes to use two of them in successive lines. ⚠ 處 here is not a place but a moment — at the point when. It is matched against 時, the time when, in the line above, and the pairing tells you how to read it.

"My source and stream are not to be measured against things of the mortal world; / my nature at birth belonged to the upper heaven."

The claim narrows from cosmic to specific: not merely old, but not of this world at all. 源流, source and stream, is the ordinary word for a lineage or provenance — where a thing came from and how it came down. She is producing papers. 本性 is original nature, and it is a loaded term. In Buddhist usage it is the nature one has before any conditioning — the thing the whole pilgrimage is meant to recover. She is using it to mean pedigree, which is either careless or very pointed.

"One body of golden light, in harmony with the Four Marks; / the auspicious vapour of the Five Phases, joined with the Three Primes."

The densest line in the poem, and it is three technical terms stacked together. The 四相 are the Four Marks — in Buddhist analysis the four phases every conditioned thing passes through: arising, continuing, changing, ceasing. ⚠ Note the reading: 相 is xiàng, a mark or an aspect, not the xiāng of doing something mutually. The 五行 are the Five Phases — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — the system that organises everything from medicine to music to dynastic succession. The 三元 are the Three Primes, heaven, earth and water in the Daoist scheme. She has now claimed Buddhist and Daoist credentials in a single couplet, which is exactly the kind of thing this book's verse does.

"Long it dwelt with me inside the Toad Palace; / long it kept me company beside the Cassia Hall."

And there it is. She has just told him where she lives. The 蟾宮 is the Toad Palace and 桂殿 the Cassia Hall, and both are names for the moon. The toad comes from the story of Chang'e, who stole the elixir of immortality, fled to the moon and was turned into one; the cassia is the tree that grows there, endlessly cut down by a woodcutter and endlessly regrowing. Three lines ago she was claiming to predate creation, which proves nothing. Now she has named a specific address, and Wukong — who has been to the Moon Palace — is listening.

"Because I loved the flowers I let myself down into the world of dust, / and so came to India and counterfeited a lovely woman."

She admits the imposture in her own boast, and gives the same reason the battle poem gave: the flowers. 嬋娟 means a beautiful woman, and it is also one of the standard poetic words for the moon itself. Using it here is a slip, or a wink — she is saying she counterfeited a beauty, and the word she reaches for is the moon's own name. ⚠ 假 is the character from the chapter's title, 假合形骸 — the false joining of a bodily frame. There it names the Buddhist teaching that every body is a provisional assembly of parts. Here she uses it as a plain verb, to counterfeit. Same character, and the chapter means both at once.

"I meant nothing by it but to share some pleasure with you; / I wished to be matched with the Tang monk and settle an old karmic debt."

The excuse, and it is the weakest thing in the poem. 宿緣 is a bond carried over from a former life — the idea that what happened in a previous life arranges the meetings of this one. It is a genuine Buddhist concept and it is being used here the way a modern reader might use we were meant to be. ⚠ 了 here is liǎo, to finish or discharge, not the light marker of completed action. She is proposing to settle an account. And 樂 is lè, pleasure — worth noting because the same character appears at the very start of this chapter as yuè, music.

"How could you be so hard-hearted as to break up a fine match, / hunting me to the death, chasing and fighting and playing the brute?"

The complaint. She has moved from cosmic pedigree to personal grievance in the space of eight lines, which is a fair measure of how the argument is going. 佳偶 is a fine match, the polite term for a well-made marriage. She is describing an abduction and a fraud as a wedding somebody rudely interrupted. 欺心 means to deceive one's own heart — to act against what one knows to be right. It is a strong accusation and it is being made by a creature who has spent a year wearing a stolen face.

"This weapon of mine has a great name to it — / greater than that gold-banded rod of yours."

The direct answer to the couplet that opened the battle poem, where her staff was the weapon nobody could name. Eight lines of pedigree have been laid down to earn it. 名頭 is reputation or standing — the fame a thing has, which is exactly what the earlier verse denied her. ⚠ 棒子 takes the light reading bàng zi. It is a slightly dismissive way to name the most famous weapon in Chinese fiction, roughly the difference between the rod and that stick of yours.

"It is the pestle that pounds the medicine in the Palace of Broad Cold — / and one blow from it sends a man's life down to the Yellow Springs!"

The reveal, saved for the last line, and it lands on Wukong and the reader together. The 廣寒宮 is the Palace of Broad Cold, the name of Chang'e's house on the moon. The 搗藥 pestle belongs to the Jade Hare, who pounds the elixir of immortality there — an image so old and so familiar that Chinese children still look for the hare in the markings of the full moon. So the joke completes itself. Wukong called it a grain pestle. It is a pestle, and it grinds the drug of deathlessness, and she has just told him her own identity without meaning to. 歸泉 — going down to the springs — is the standard way of saying to die, the Yellow Springs being the world below.