The elder was just exchanging courtesies with the squire when a house-boy came in to report: "The guests have all arrived." These were the ones who had been invited — neighbours to left and right, the wife's younger brother and the cousins on her mother's side, the husbands of the elder and younger sisters — and with them some fellow-abstainers of the same persuasion and some good friends who recite the Buddha's name. All of them together bowed to the elder. The bowing done, each took his seat.

⚠ The guest list is precise in a way English cannot easily match. Chinese names each in-law separately — a wife's younger brother is not the same word as a sister's husband, and an elder sister's husband is not the same word as a younger sister's — and the sentence uses four such terms in eight characters. English has one word for all of them. ⚠ 齋公 and 善友 are the last two categories and they are not family. One is a layman who keeps to a meatless diet, the other a layman who recites the Buddha's name. Kou Hong's send-off has drawn his relations and his co-religionists, and the chapter names both groups in the same breath. 左鄰右舍 — neighbours left and right — takes the reading for a dwelling, not the one for casting something away. All three in this chapter are dwellings and the plain reading gets all three wrong.

Below the hall there were zithers and reed-pipes; above it, strings and singing over the wine.

⚠ The last character of this line is one the simplified view cannot handle. 絃歌酒讌 — strings and singing over the wine — ends on a rare spelling of a perfectly ordinary word for a banquet, and the automatic conversion turns it into a form that is not in the modern standard set at all and that most fonts cannot draw. ⚠ The plain word for the same thing sits five characters later, in 這一席盛宴. One banquet, two spellings, one sentence apart — and in the simplified view they come out as two different characters, one of them unreadable. The correction for this was put and not taken, so it stands as it is and gets reported on every run rather than passing unnoticed. ⚠ The staging is worth noticing too: musicians below the hall, singing above it. Guests of rank sat up on the raised floor and the players performed down on the level. The room arranges its own people by rank.

At this splendid feast Bajie paid close attention, and said to Shaseng: "Brother, open your heart and open your capacity and get some of this down. Once we're away from the Kou house there'll be nothing this good again."

⚠ 放懷放量 — let out your heart, let out your capacity. The second half takes the reading for how much a thing holds, and the chapter's only other use of the character is in the same sense. ⚠ And Bajie is right. That is what makes the line land. There will not be anything this good again — they are eight hundred li from Vulture Peak and the next thing that happens to them, at the end of this chapter, is a night in a roofless ruin in the rain. 留心 — he paid close attention. Not to the guests or the music. To the table.

Shaseng laughed. "What are you talking about, second brother? As they say: of a hundred rare delicacies, one bellyful and you're done. There is such a thing as money kept back for yourself. There is no such thing as a stomach kept back for yourself."

⚠⚠ 只有私房路，哪有私房肚 is the best joke in the chapter and it is built on one word. 私房 means what a person keeps back privately — savings held out of the common purse, a wife's own money, anything set aside. Shaseng puts it twice: you can have a private stash on the road, but nobody has a private stomach. ⚠ It is a joke about storage, and it is aimed exactly at what Bajie is doing — eating now against a hungry future, as though a stomach were a purse. Two hundred characters from now Bajie will fill his sleeves with buns, which is his answer to it. ⚠ 哪 is the question word, spelled with its own character. This edition keeps the two apart throughout, which is why all fifty of the pointing ones in this chapter are genuinely pointing and none of them is a question in disguise.