Form after form, and none of it was ever form; emptiness upon emptiness, and it is not emptiness either.

The chapter opens with an argument instead of a scene, which is unusual and deliberate. Ninety-five chapters in, the pilgrims are eight hundred li from the mountain they set out for, and the book stops to say something about what they have been doing. The two words doing the work are 色 and 空, and they are the two words at the centre of the Heart Sutra, the short text every literate reader of this novel had by heart. There they sit in a famous balance: 色 — form, matter, everything you can see and touch — is not different from 空, emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. ⚠ The line plays a small trick with that. 色 appears three times in five characters and 空 three times in the next five, doubled up front and then knocked down at the end. It reads almost like a man talking himself out of something: form, form — no, never form. Empty, empty — not that either.

Stillness and clamour, speech and silence, were one thing from the beginning; why labour, inside a dream, to expound a dream?

夢裡何勞說夢 is the sharp end of the couplet — the matched pair of lines that makes up each step of this poem — and it is an old Chan line, not this author's invention. Explaining a dream while you are still asleep inside it: the explanation is made of the same stuff as the thing explained, so it cannot get you out. The modern version writes itself. It is arguing about the plot of a film while you are still in the cinema, or trying to describe the water while you are the fish. Any account you give is coming from inside the thing you are trying to stand outside of. ⚠ 夢 is used twice in six characters and it is the only place in the whole chapter the word appears — the rest of Chapter 96 is feasting, book-keeping and a rainstorm.

There is use, and in the middle of use there is no use; there is no merit, and inside merit the work gets done.

功 is merit — specifically the merit you bank by doing good, which in this chapter is about to become very concrete indeed. Kou Hong has vowed to feed ten thousand monks and has fed nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-six of them, and he has been counting. So the couplet is not floating philosophy. It is the chapter's opening position on the exact thing the chapter is about. 無功功裡施功 says that the merit worth having is the merit you were not keeping score of, which is a hard thing to say to a man with a ledger. ⚠ The repetition is the same trick as the first couplet: 用 three times, then 功 three times, each word set against itself.

It is like fruit that ripens red of its own accord: do not ask how it was tended and sown.

After three couplets of paradox the lyric suddenly puts its feet on the ground and talks about an orchard. That is the turn, and it is what makes the poem land: you cannot argue somebody into ripeness. ⚠ 種 is zhòng here, the reading for planting something, not zhǒng, a seed or a kind. 修種 pairs two things a farmer does — tending and sowing — and it answers the fruit in the line above. The pairing appears exactly once in the whole book, so there is no second site to check it against; the argument for the planting reading is that 如何 wants an action after it, and that the picture needs two verbs to work. The rhyme cannot settle it either way, because the whole lyric rhymes on one group — 空, 夢, 功, 種 — and that group takes both readings.

The tale tells how the Tang Monk and his disciples used their powers to hold back the monks of the Jetavana temple.

話表 is a storyteller's throat-clearing — roughly "now, the tale tells" — and it is the signal that the poem is over and the plot is resuming. Chapter 96 uses it once and uses its twin, the other stock opener, once as well; Chapter 95 used the twin three times and this one not at all. The book keeps both in its pocket. 布金寺 is the Jetavana temple, where the pilgrims spent the last two chapters. The name means "spreading gold", and it remembers the story of the merchant who bought the grove where the Buddha taught by covering its ground with gold coins. The novel has been sitting inside that name for three chapters and is now walking out of it.

When the monks saw the dark wind pass and could not find master or disciples, they took them for living Buddhas come down among men, knocked their heads on the ground, and went home. Of that, no more.

The pilgrims have left by conjuring a wind and vanishing into it, which is not a miracle so much as a way of avoiding a long goodbye. The monks kneel to the empty road. ⚠ 以為 is wéi, the reading for taking something to be something — and all three 為 in this chapter want that reading, though the plain dictionary answer gives the other one at every single site. A band of three is not a safe band. 不題 — "of that, no more" — is the storyteller cutting a thread he does not intend to pick up. It is the spoken equivalent of a scene change, and the novel uses it whenever it wants to leave people mid-gesture. These monks are left kneeling for the rest of the book.