Every one of them light in body and quick on his feet, they walked up the Spirit Mountain.

⚠ 身輕體快 — light of body, quick of frame. It reads as high spirits and it is meant literally: the mortal weight came off in the river a hundred characters ago, and the book is recording the physical consequence. 步上靈山 — walked up. Still walking, right to the top, as the Great Immortal insisted.

And soon they saw the ancient temple of Thunderclap:

⚠ 雷音古剎 — the ancient temple of Thunderclap. The last character is a transcription, not a Chinese word: it renders kṣetra, a Buddha-field or holy precinct, and it is read chà. The same character spells the everyday word for a brake or a moment, and one of its readings means to kill. ⚠ This whole seven-character phrase occurs once in the novel. Everywhere else the destination is Thunderclap Monastery; here, at the moment of arrival, the book calls it ancient. ⚠ And it is a cue with no set phrase in it — just soon they saw and a colon. What follows is the longest set-piece in the chapter, fifteen lines, and nothing announces it.

Its summit rubs the middle of the high sky; / its roots join the veins of Sumeru.

⚠ 須彌 — Sumeru, the world-mountain at the centre of Buddhist cosmology, around which everything else is arranged. Saying that Thunderclap shares its root-system is a claim about rank, not geology. ⚠ 霄漢 — the high sky. The second character is the sky-river again, as in the abbey towers two thousand characters ago, and not the Han dynasty it also spells. 脈 — veins, the lines along which a mountain range runs. Chinese geomancy treats a range as a circulatory system and this is its word.

Cunning peaks drawn up in ranks, / strange rocks at uneven heights.

⚠⚠ 參差 is a trap, and it takes both characters with it. The word means uneven, ragged, of different lengths — and NEITHER character is read the way it is read anywhere else. The pair is cēn cī. The first spells the word for ginseng and for joining an audience; the second spells difference, error and dispatch, all of which occur in this chapter. Here both are set aside. It is one of the oldest words in the language — it opens the second stanza of the first poem in the Book of Songs — and it occurs four times in this novel.

Below the sheer cliffs, jasper grasses and flowers of fine jade; / alongside the winding paths, purple fungus and fragrant orchid.

⚠ 瑤草琪花 — the same two words as the opening of the chapter, where the pilgrims first noticed that the western country looked different. The phrase has come back, reversed, at the top of the mountain. The book has used it to open the road and to close it. 紫芝 — the purple bracket fungus of long life, which grew in the Daoist abbey's garden two thousand characters ago and grows here too. ⚠ 傍 — alongside. páng, the preposition, and not the bàng of leaning against something.

An immortal ape picking fruit goes into the peach grove — / and it is as though fire were burning gold;

⚠ An immortal ape in a peach grove. The book has put Monkey's own biography — Chapters 4 and 5, the Peach Garden, the theft that started the war with Heaven — into the scenery of paradise, as decoration, without a word of comment. 卻似火燒金 — like fire burning gold. The image is of colour: red fur among yellow fruit. It is also, if you have been reading since Chapter 7, a monkey and a furnace.

A white crane settling on a pine and standing on the branch-end / is for all the world like smoke cupping jade.

渾如煙捧玉 — exactly like smoke holding up a piece of jade. White bird, dark pine, and the bird seems to float rather than perch. The two lines pair by colour and by element: fire on gold, smoke on jade. Neither describes what a thing is; both describe what it looks like it is made of.

Painted phoenixes two by two, / blue luan birds pair by pair.

⚠ Four characters against four, and both halves end on a doubled word. 雙雙 and 對對 both mean in pairs, and using them one after the other is not repetition so much as insistence. ⚠ Hold this line. The next two lines take it apart and expand each half in turn, which is the same trick the Daoist boy's portrait used at the abbey.

Painted phoenixes two by two: / turned to the sun, one cry of theirs is an omen for the world;

And there is the expansion — the first half of the line before, repeated whole and then continued. ⚠ 天下瑞 — a good omen for all under heaven. The phoenix is not decorative in Chinese thought; it appears when a sage rules and the age is at peace. One cry of it is a political event.

blue luan birds pair by pair: / facing into the wind, their glittering dance is a rare thing in this world.

The second half expanded in its turn, and the couplet closes. ⚠ 世間稀 — rare in the world. Set it beside 天下瑞 in the line above and the pairing is exact: one bird is an omen for everybody, the other is a sight almost nobody gets. Public and private, in three characters each.

And then they saw the deep dense yellow of golden tiles laid in overlapping pairs, and the bright dazzle of flowered bricks set with agate.

⚠ The verse changes gear here from nature to architecture, and it announces the change with two four-character sound-words: 黃森森, a dense packed yellow, and 明幌幌, a shifting glare. Doubling the last character of a colour word is how Chinese makes a colour feel like a surface. ⚠ 疊鴛鴦 — laid like mandarin ducks. Roof tiles overlap in interlocking pairs, and the trade name for that pattern is the bird that famously goes about in couples. Straight after three lines about birds in pairs, the roof is doing it too. ⚠ 鋪 — to lay or spread. The verb, pū, and not the pù of a shopfront that the same character also spells.

A row to the east, a row to the west, and all of it palaces of flower-hearts and gate-towers of pearl;

⚠⚠ 東一行，西一行 — a ROW east, a ROW west. The character is read háng here, a line of things side by side, and this is the genuine article: almost everywhere else in this book the same character is xíng, to walk or to travel, including in Monkey's own name. The two clauses are the same three characters with one changed, which is how the verse says in every direction without saying it. 蕊宮 — a palace of flower-hearts, a Daoist name for a celestial building. Daoist vocabulary again, at the gate of the Buddha's own house.

A stretch to the south, a stretch to the north, and more treasure-pavilions and precious towers than the eye can finish.

The matching pair, with the other two directions and a different measure word: rows to east and west, stretches north and south. ⚠ 看不了 — cannot be finished looking at. The last character is liǎo, to complete, and not the light one that closes a verb everywhere else in this chapter. It is the same character both times and the job is different.

Above the Hall of the Heavenly Kings a rosy light streams out; / before the Hall of the Dharma-Protectors purple flames go up.

⚠ Two named buildings, and both are real. The 天王殿 is the first hall of any Chinese Buddhist temple, where the four guardian kings of the directions stand; the 護法堂 houses the dharma-protectors. A visitor to a temple today walks past both in that order. The verse has been describing a paradise and has quietly become a floor plan.

The stupa-tower stands plain to see, / the utpala flowers are fragrant.

⚠ Two transcriptions in eight characters. 浮屠 renders stūpa, the domed reliquary that became the Chinese pagoda — the novel says it eleven times, in eleven different chapters. 優缽 renders utpala, the blue lotus, and occurs twice, both here. Neither word is Chinese and neither is explained. The book expects a reader who has been in a temple.

Truly the ground is so fine you doubt this is the same heaven; / the clouds are so idle you feel the day grow long.

⚠ The whole fifteen-line set-piece turns here, from what is there to what it does to you. 疑 and 覺 are both verbs of the onlooker: you doubt, you feel. ⚠ 晝長 — the day is LONG. cháng, length, and not the reading for an elder that the same character carries four times elsewhere in these pages, including in the word for Tripitaka himself. ⚠ 雲閑 — the clouds are idle. That is the line to keep. In a chapter that has counted fourteen years, five watches and eighty-one ordeals, what tells them they have arrived is that nothing has anywhere to be.

The red dust does not reach here, and all conditions are at an end; / through ten thousand ages the great Dharma Hall stands undiminished.

⚠ 紅塵 — the red dust. The standing Chinese image for the world of ordinary life, its noise and traffic and appetite, and one of the very few Buddhist metaphors that has passed whole into everyday speech. The novel uses it eight times in eight chapters. ⚠ 諸緣盡 — all conditions ended. 緣 is the Buddhist term for the causes and circumstances that keep a person entangled; saying they are finished is saying the same thing the poem in the boat said about the six dusts, and the same thing the bath at the abbey claimed to do. The set-piece ends on a building that does not wear out, after fifteen lines of things that shine, move and sing.