Now to take up the tale: Squire Kou, having been brought back to life, once more put in order his banners and streamers, his drums and music, his monks and Daoists and kinsmen and friends, and saw them off as he had done before — but of that no more.

The chapter opens by finishing somebody else's story and then walking away from it. Squire Kou was robbed, kicked to death and fetched back out of the underworld over the whole of the last chapter; here he gets one sentence, and the sentence is about a parade. ⚠ 依舊送行 — saw him off as before. And that is the joke, if you have just read Chapter 97. The gaudy send-off with drums and banners is the thing that told a gang of thieves which house in town was worth robbing. It killed him. Now he is alive again and doing it a second time, with the same banners, and the book records it without a flicker. The last two characters close the thread: 不題, roughly no more of that. It is the storyteller putting one thing down to pick up another, and this chapter reaches for it five times — more often than any other closing move it has. A chapter of departures. 鼓樂 is drums and music. The second character is the one that also spells the everyday word for joy, written identically and sounding nothing alike; here it is music, as it was at both of its places in Chapter 96 and again in Chapter 97. Same procession, three chapters running.

Now as for the Tang monk and his three: they took to the highroad, and the Buddha-land of the West was indeed unlike any other country. They saw rare blossoms and jasper grasses, ancient cypress and hoary pine;

And there is the hinge. 卻說 — now as for — hands the story from the man left behind to the men going on, and it is the second of only two in this chapter. Chapter 97 needed three to keep track of a robbery, a widow and a court; this one has almost nowhere left to cut away to. ⚠ 果然西方佛地，與他處不同 — the Buddha-land of the West was indeed unlike any other country. Take that sentence at face value, because it is doing structural work. For ninety-seven chapters the scenery has been a place where something is about to go wrong. From here it stops being that. The ground itself has changed. 琪花瑤草 is a set phrase for the flora of a paradise — flowers of fine jade, grasses of jasper. The novel keeps it for exactly this kind of moment and uses it six times in all.

in every district they passed through, house by house the people were turned to goodness, and door by door they set out food for monks;

Two matched pairs, and the shape carries the sense: 家家 house by house, 戶戶 door by door. Doubling a word like this is how Chinese says every single one, and it turns a claim about a region into a picture of a street. ⚠ 齋僧 is the phrase to stop on. It means to feed monks as an act of merit, and it is what Squire Kou did for twenty-four years and ten thousand monks — the vow whose completion opened the last chapter and whose celebration got him killed. Here a whole countryside does it as a matter of course, in four characters, and nobody dies of it. The novel uses this word forty-four times across fifteen chapters, and its last two before this one are Chapters 96 and 97.

at the foot of every hill they came upon someone at his practice, and among the trees they saw travellers reciting the scriptures.

The picture narrows from districts to single people. 修行 is religious practice — the daily work of it, not a state you arrive at — and it is the same word the pilgrims have been using about themselves since Chapter 2. Notice where the two figures are put: one at the foot of a hill, one in the trees. Not in temples. The point of the two lines is that in this country you do not have to go anywhere to find the practice; you trip over it.