They saw them all the way out beyond the prefectural city and went as far as the ten-li pavilion, where baskets of food and jars of drink had been set out; they raised their cups, drank together, and parted. The squire still could not bear to let them go, and said with the tears standing in his eyes, "Teacher, when you come back with the scriptures you must, without fail, come to my house and stay a few days more — to settle the heart of me, Kou Hong."

簞食壺漿 is a quotation and it is the last find of this chapter. In Mencius the people come out with baskets of food and jars of drink to welcome an army that has freed them, and the phrase has meant that welcome ever since. The novel has borrowed it for a farewell. In the citation the second character is read sì — the older sound, for prepared food given to somebody else — the sense that the character 飼 was later invented to carry. The plain reading gives the everyday word for eating instead. The phrase occurs once in the whole book, and the character is on none of the lists this project watches, so nothing but reading the line would have caught it — the same way the music notation was caught two thousand characters ago. 十里長亭 is the roadside pavilion set at ten-li intervals where travellers were seen off. The first character is the one meaning long, not the one meaning senior, and it appears twice in this chapter — once here and once fifteen characters later. And 以了我寇洪之心 is the verb meaning to finish something, not the light word that marks a completed action. He wants his heart settled. He is not asking for company; he is asking for the account to be closed.

Tripitaka, unable to thank him enough or make an end of thanking him, said: "If I reach Vulture Peak and am granted sight of the Buddha, the first thing I shall set forth is the squire's great goodness. On the way back I shall certainly come to your door and bow my thanks — bow my thanks."

感之不盡，謝之無已 — moved beyond exhausting it, thanking without ending. This is the third and last appearance of the little formula meaning there is no finishing it. The first was of the road itself, in the summer poem; the second of the scholars' praise; and this one of Tripitaka's gratitude to the man he has spent a fortnight trying to get away from. All three come out right without any help. That depends on a repair made at the close of the previous chapter, which put a hundred and two sites across sixty-five chapters straight, and these three are its proof. What he actually promises is worth reading twice. He will report Kou Hong's virtue to the Buddha, and he will call at the door on the way home. Both are promises about a future beyond the end of this chapter, and the next chapter is about to make one of them impossible.

Talking as they went, they had gone another two or three li without noticing, and the elder took his leave in earnest. The squire burst out weeping aloud, and turned back. And this is exactly it:

He weeps out loud. Not decorously, not privately — the text says he let his voice go and cried, and then turned round and walked home. Consider what the chapter has been doing to this man. He has been generous past all sense for a fortnight, been argued with, seen a fistfight in his sutra hall, had his wife and sons walk out in a temper, spent a night's wages on a send-off nobody wanted, failed to feed the last two companies of monks to arrive, and now stands in a road two or three li beyond where he meant to stop, crying. 這正是 is the cue, and it is the ninth and last of them in the chapter. Nine of the ten set-pieces carry one; only the opening lyric has none, because nothing stands in front of it.

He had the vow to feed monks, and goes home to wondrous awakening; / he had no tie of destiny, and will not see the Buddha come thus.

This is the chapter's judgement on Kou Hong and it is two lines long. The first half grants him everything: the vow was real, it is complete, and it carries him to 妙覺 — the very highest of the bodhisattva stages, the last one before buddhahood. The word appears once in the whole novel and it is spent on him. And then the second half takes something away. 無緣 — no karmic tie. He will not see the Buddha. Twenty-four years, ten thousand meals, a chapel finer than a monastery's, and the one thing the four men at his table are walking towards is the one thing he does not get. The couplet does not say this is unfair, and it does not say the vow was wasted. It says both things at once and puts them in matched halves: the having and the not-having, weighed against each other in fourteen characters. It is also a warning. The novel does not usually tell you in advance that somebody will never get what they want, and it has just done so about a man who is walking home in tears.