The elder washed his hands, took up incense, and finished his bows. Then he turned back to pay his respects to the squire. The squire said, "Wait a moment — let us meet properly in the sutra hall." And there again he saw:

行禮 here takes the reading for carrying something out, performing it — and the plain dictionary chain gives the wrong word at this site. What makes it worth flagging is that 正欲行禮 a hundred and twenty-five characters further on, in the very next passage, is the same word and comes out right without any help at all. Same two characters, same meaning, and the machinery splits them on nothing but what happens to follow. Notice also that Kou Hong will not accept a bow in the Buddha hall. He stops it and moves the whole party next door before he will be greeted, which is a small piece of etiquette with a large idea inside it: courtesies between men do not belong in the room kept for the Buddha.

Square stands and upright cabinets; jade caskets and gold cases.

Four pieces of furniture named flat, with no verbs at all — and then the next two lines pick them up two at a time and tell you what is inside them. It is the shape of a camera pulling back and then going in twice. The first rhapsody did the same thing with censers and boxes. This one does it more tightly, and it is the only formal trick the passage uses.

On the square stands and in the upright cabinets, scriptures without number piled up;

The first half of the pick-up. Whatever else Kou Hong is, he has a collection — and the rhapsody is at pains to say it is stored properly, in cabinets, not stacked in a corner.

in the jade caskets and the gold cases, documents in their hundreds put safely away.

簡札 is the word for written slips and letters, not scripture. It occurs once in this chapter and it changes what the room is: this is not only a chapel library but a working muniment room, with the household's papers in it. Remember that he keeps a written ledger of every monk he has fed. It is probably in one of these.

On the painted lacquer table: paper, ink, brush and inkstone, every one of them the finest a study can hold;

紙墨筆硯 are the four things that define a Chinese scholar's desk — so much so that they have a collective name, the four treasures of the study. Naming all four is the same move as saying a kitchen has knives, board, pans and stove: it means a real working one, not an ornament.

before the pepper-plaster screen: books, paintings, a zither and a chess set, and every one of them a subtle and far-reaching pleasure.

書畫琴棋 are the four accomplishments — calligraphy, painting, the zither and chess — the set of skills that defined a cultivated man, and here they are listed in one breath with the four treasures above them. 椒粉屏 is the detail that gives the game away. Pepper mixed into wall plaster was a genuine luxury: it warmed a room and scented it, and the empress's own apartments were built that way. A country squire with a pepper-plastered wall is spending money the way a man buys marble now. So look at what this room actually is. It is not a monk's cell. It is a gentleman's study, with a scripture collection in it — and Kou Hong's two sons, who arrive in a few passages, are studying for the examinations.

Set out, an immortal's chime of light jade and floating gold; hung up, a whisk of dragon-whisker that wears the wind and wears the moon.

龍髯 — dragon's beard — is a fly-whisk, the long-handled horsehair switch that hermits and immortals carry in Chinese art. And 披風披月, wearing the wind and wearing the moon, is the vocabulary of Daoist retirement, not Buddhist practice. That is worth pausing on. There is a Daoist accessory hanging on the wall of a Buddhist sutra hall, described in Daoist language, and nobody in the chapter remarks on it. Kou Hong's household does not sort its holiness into boxes, and neither, most of the time, does this novel.

The clean air of the place makes a man's spirits fresh; with the mind kept fasting, the heart of the Way finds its own ease.

齋心 is the best small thing in the passage. That first character appears thirty times in Chapter 96, and twenty-nine of those times it means a vegetarian meal — begging one, eating one, cooking one, counting how many you have given away. Here, once, it means to fast the mind: to empty it out and keep it clean. And the phrase is not Buddhist. It comes from Zhuangzi, where fasting the heart is a way of becoming empty enough for the Way to gather in you. So the rhapsody ends its Buddhist library with a Daoist idea, in a room with a hermit's whisk on the wall. The pun is doing real work. The whole chapter is about a man who feeds monks by the thousand and counts them. Here the same word, for one line only, means the other kind of fasting — the kind you cannot put in a ledger.