The elder reached the hall and was about to make his bow when the squire caught him by the arm again: "Please, loosen your Buddha robe." So Tripitaka took off the cassock.

This is the second time in two passages that Kou Hong has physically stopped a bow. First he moved the whole party out of the chapel rather than be greeted in it; now he takes hold of Tripitaka's arm to prevent one. 請寬佛衣 — loosen your Buddha robe — is a host telling a guest to make himself comfortable, in the exact form you would use for a man in heavy formal dress. It is what you say when somebody has arrived over-dressed out of respect for you. And here 正欲行禮 comes out right, without any help, while the identical word a hundred and twenty-five characters earlier did not. Both sites sit close enough to read together, and the pair is the plainest case in the chapter of why every one of these has to be read rather than trusted.

Only then would he greet the elder, and after that he asked to be presented to Wukong and the other two. He gave orders for the horse to be fed and the luggage put under the covered walk, and only then did he ask after their health.

Watch the order of operations, because the passage is counting them off deliberately: greet the master, then the disciples, then feed the horse, then stow the baggage, and only after all of that ask how anybody is. That is not slowness. It is a man discharging every obligation of hospitality in the correct sequence before he permits himself a single personal question. And he insisted on being presented to the three disciples — the ones the marketplace had been crowding round to gawp at an hour earlier. 問起居 — asking after somebody's rising and sitting — is the formal enquiry after health and comfort. It is the point at which a reception stops being ceremony and becomes a conversation.

Tripitaka said, "This poor monk is sent by imperial commission from the Land of the East, the Great Tang, to your honoured country, to visit Vulture Peak, look upon the Buddha and seek the true scriptures. Hearing that your household honours monks, I have come to call — asking one meal, and then we go on."

欽差 is the imperial commission — a man sent out under the emperor's own warrant. The character for sending here is the one for despatching somebody on an errand, and the plain dictionary chain gives it the word for lacking or being wrong instead. That mistake is not confined to this site. Across the whole book the character appears three hundred and ten times in eighty-nine chapters, two hundred and fifty-eight of them meaning to send somebody, and the chain reads almost all of those the other way. This chapter rules its three sites by hand and leaves the rest of the book as it stands. And look at the last five characters: 求一齋就行. One meal, and then we go. He has now said it twice — once to the old men on the bench and once to his host — and neither time has anybody heard him.