The elder stepped up, put his palms together and called: "Old benefactor — a poor monk pays his respects."

Three pieces of monastic manners in sixteen characters, and each one is a fixed form rather than a description. 合掌 is the palms pressed together, the gesture every reader would picture without being told. It happens once in this chapter, right here, and it is how Tripitaka opens a conversation with a stranger. 問訊 is not "asking" — it is the set greeting a monk gives, a fixed phrase with a bow attached, closer to a formal handshake than to a question. And 貧僧 is how he refers to himself throughout: the poor monk, a humble first person a monk uses about himself the way a courtier might say "your servant". He says it five times in this chapter, and never once uses an ordinary word for "I".

The two old men were in the middle of an idle argument about nothing in particular — how things rise and fall, what is gained and what lost, who in the old days was a sage and who merely worthy, and where all the great deeds of those times had got to now. It was, you might fairly say, one long sigh.

⚠ Look at what these two are talking about. Dynasties rising and falling, the difference between a sage and a merely worthy man, the heroes of the past and where they went. That is the subject matter of Chinese history-writing, argued on a bench by two men with nothing else to do — and standing behind them, unnoticed, is a party of four who have spent fourteen years on a journey that will end up in exactly that kind of book. ⚠ 興 is xīng here, the rise of a thing, not the xìng of being in the mood for something. 興衰 appears exactly once in the whole hundred chapters, and neither of its two characters is in any of the lists this project watches — so nothing would have flagged it. It was found by reading the line. 誠可謂大嘆息 is the narrator stepping in to grade the conversation, and the grade is affectionate. A great sigh. Not wrong, not useless, just two old men sighing at history on a warm afternoon.

Hearing the greeting spoken suddenly behind them, they returned the courtesy: "What has the elder to say?"

忽聽得 — the word for hearing here takes the full reading, because it belongs to a small family of set phrases about perceiving something: hearing it, smelling it, seeing it, recognising it. In each of them the second character has stopped being a separate word and become part of the verb, and the sound follows. 答禮 is returning a bow with a bow. Neither old man is a Buddhist and neither hesitates. That is the texture the chapter wants: a place where the courtesies work, and where a monk asking a question in the street gets a straight answer.

Tripitaka said, "This poor monk has come from far away to worship the Buddha. I have only just reached your honoured district and do not know what the place is called. Is there a household hereabouts inclined to charity, where I might beg a single meal?"

He asks for one meal. He will be fed for a month, and the whole quarrel in the back half of this chapter comes out of the gap between those two numbers. ⚠ 化齋 — to beg a meal — appears once in Chapter 96, and this is it. The character 齋 appears thirty times. He asks for food once and then spends the rest of the chapter surrounded by it. ⚠ 哪裡 is worth a moment. This edition spells the question word with its own character, and uses a different one for pointing at something. That is not the usual practice in Ming printing, where one character does both jobs and the reader works out which is meant — and it means that in this chapter every single one of the fifty pointing ones is genuinely pointing. The edition has done the disambiguating for us.