A good five or seven turns of morning and evening went by before the squire sent for twenty-four of the local monks who take invitations, to put on the rite of completion. The monks spent three or four days writing out the documents, chose a favourable hour, and opened the service. The way of the world there was much the same as in the Great Tang, and indeed it went like this:

⚠ 應佛僧 is a trade. These are monks who take engagements — who come when a household sends for them and perform the service for a fee. The word for answering here is the one for answering a summons, and it appears three times in the whole novel, in this chapter and two others. ⚠ So Kou Hong has not asked his four holy guests to conduct the rite. He has hired twenty-four professionals, and they take three or four days just writing out the paperwork before anybody lights a candle. ⚠⚠ And then the author's aside: 他那裡與大唐的世情一般 — the way of the world there is much the same as in the Great Tang. That is the thesis of the whole chapter in eleven characters. This is the holy west, the country the pilgrims have crossed a continent to reach, and its funerals and its feast days and its hired clergy work exactly like home.

Banners run up high, the golden faces set out;

⚠ 金容 — the golden countenance — means the images themselves, brought out and arranged for the occasion. And the word for setting them out is the verb to spread, the third of five in this chapter and not one of them the shopfront the plain reading keeps reaching for.

candles taken up together, incense burnt in offering.

The two opening lines are a matched pair and both are about arrangement rather than devotion: put the images out, take the candles up. A rite of this kind is a production, and the rhapsody begins with the stage.

Drums pounded and cymbals struck, reed-pipes blown and flutes fingered.

Four instruments in eight characters, two struck and two blown. Buddhist services of this period were loud, and the novel's readers would have heard one — this is the sound of a funeral or a merit-rite going past in the street.

Cloud-gongs; the crosswise flute clear in tone — and all of it written out in the old chě and gōng notation.

⚠ 雲鑼 is a real instrument: ten small tuned gongs hung in a wooden frame and struck with a beater. It appears once in the whole novel. ⚠⚠ 尺工字樣 is the find of this chapter. Chinese musicians wrote their music down using a set of ordinary characters as note-names, and two of those note-names are the characters here. So the line is not saying the music was fine — it is saying the players were reading from a score. ⚠ The first of the two is not read the way it looks. As an ordinary word it means a foot, the measure; as the name of the note it is said chě. The phrase occurs once in the whole book, neither character is on any of the lists this project watches, and nothing but reading the line would have caught it.

A round struck, a round blown, and then in clear voices all together they opened the scripture treasury.

⚠ 經藏 is the sutra collection — the treasury, one of the three baskets the canon is divided into. The character is the same one in 三藏, the name Tripitaka carries, which means precisely a man who holds all three. ⚠ The plain reading gives the verb to hide instead, at this one site. The chapter has twenty-five of this character and twenty-three of them are the monk's own name; of the two that are not, this is the one that goes wrong.

First the earth-god settled, then the spirit-generals invited.

⚠ The order is correct liturgy, not decoration. You secure the 土地 — the local earth-god who owns the ground you are standing on — before you invite anything down onto it. Every rite of this kind begins by asking the landlord's permission. ⚠ 神將 are ranked divine officers, and the second character is the word for a general. The plain reading gives the everyday little word instead — the one meaning about to, or taking hold of, which turns up eight other times in this chapter and is right at every one of them.

Documents dispatched, images bowed to.

⚠ 文書 here are the written petitions — physical documents drawn up naming the donor and the merit sought, then burnt so the smoke carries them up to the celestial bureaucracy. That is what the twenty-four monks spent three or four days writing. ⚠ It is the same paperwork the pilgrims themselves carry. Their travel warrant has to be stamped at every court on earth; Kou Hong's petition has to be filed with a court in heaven. This novel's cosmos runs on documents.

One volume of the Peacock Sutra expounded, and every line of it dispelling calamity;

⚠ The Peacock Sutra is a real and much-used text — a spell-scripture whose peacock queen swallows poison and turns it harmless, chanted against snakebite, sickness and disaster. Naming it is not colour. It tells a reader exactly what this rite is for: protection. The book titles are marked with their own brackets, and this is the second of the chapter's four.

a rack of Medicine Buddha lamps lit, flame upon flame burning bright.

⚠ The Medicine Buddha is the healing Buddha of the eastern paradise, and lighting lamps before him — a rack of forty-nine was the standard number — is a rite for lengthening life. So in two lines Kou Hong has bought protection from disaster and an extension of his own days. ⚠ He is sixty-four. Nothing in the chapter says he is ill or afraid. But a man who vowed at forty to feed ten thousand monks, and is four short at sixty-four, has reason to want the arithmetic to hold a little longer.

The Water Penance performed, old grudges and guilt loosed;

⚠ The Water Penance is another real liturgy — a long confessional service built on the story of a monk whose ancient enemy pursued him through rebirths as a sore on his knee, until a holy spring washed it away. It is the standard rite for clearing debts you cannot remember incurring.

the Avatamsaka chanted, and slander swept away.

The fourth text and the fourth benefit. Read the four together and the programme is complete: calamity averted, life lengthened, old guilt cleared, reputation cleaned. This is a service with an agenda, and the agenda is Kou Hong's.

The wonderful law of the Three Vehicles, most diligently done; and one monk or two, they were all of them the same.

⚠ 三乘 — the Three Vehicles — is the standing image for the three kinds of Buddhist path, and the character for vehicle takes its own reading, shèng, whenever it means one. That rule holds without exception across the novel. ⚠ And then the last line is not a compliment. 一二沙門皆一樣 — one or two of the monks, all just alike. After twelve lines of banners, gongs, sutras and lamps, the rhapsody ends by noting that the hired clergy were interchangeable. It is the only flat note in the piece, and it is placed last.