Brocade upon his back, / a jade whisk swinging in his hand.

The portrait opens on two things: what he is wearing and what he is holding. ⚠ 玉麈 — the jade whisk. It is a long-handled fly-whisk made from the tail of a deer, and it is not for flies. Carrying one marked you as a man who talks about the deep questions; it is the conductor's baton of metaphysics, and by the Ming a picture of an immortal was not finished without it. The character occurs eight times in the novel and twice in this portrait alone.

Brocade upon his back — / and often he goes to the banquets of the jewelled pavilions and the Jasper Pool;

The line repeats the first four characters of the one before it and then extends them. That is how this kind of set-piece expands: state the image, then say what it implies. 瑤池, the Jasper Pool, is the Queen Mother of the West's own garden, and the peaches Monkey stole in Chapter 5 grew beside it. Saying a man is often at those banquets places him socially at once — he is on the guest list of Heaven.

a jade whisk swinging in his hand — / and always he flicks the dust away in the cinnabar terraces and purple courts.

The same trick again with the second image, and this time it turns on a small oddity. ⚠ The whisk in the first half is 玉麈, with the deer. What he flicks in the second half is 揮塵 — and that is the ordinary character for dust, not the deer at all. Two characters that differ by their left-hand part and sound alike, used four characters apart. Whether the printer meant the pun or made a slip, the effect is the same: the whisk and the dust it whisks are all but the same word.

At his elbow hang the immortals' registers, / on his feet are sandals and shoes.

⚠ 仙籙 — the registers of the immortals. These are the written rolls of Daoist heaven: who is on the establishment, at what rank, with what powers. Carrying a set of them at your elbow is like walking about with the staff list. It is the same kind of document Monkey struck his own name out of in Chapter 3. The second half comes straight back down to earth — shoes. The portrait keeps doing this: one line in the clouds, one line at ground level.

Lightly he moves, a true feathered gentleman; / handsome indeed, and truly a wonder.

⚠ 羽士 — a feathered gentleman, which is a standing Chinese word for a Daoist. It comes from the idea that an adept who completes the work grows light enough to fly, and the vocabulary stuck: to this day the phrase for becoming an immortal is to sprout feathers and rise. So the portrait has now told a reader three times over, without naming him, which house this man belongs to: the whisk, the registers, the feathers.

He has refined long life to its finish and dwells in the finest of places; / he has cultivated everlasting years and shaken off the dust of the world.

⚠ 長生 is cháng shēng, long life — the first character read as length, not as the senior of an elder. The novel says this word sixty-eight times in thirty-six chapters and it is the whole object of Daoist practice. The two halves are built the same way: a verb of refining, then what he got for it, then where it left him. 塵埃, the dust of the world, will come back in the bathing poem a few hundred characters from here, where somebody else washes it off.

The holy monk does not know this guest of the Spirit Mountain: / here comes the Golden-Crowned Great Immortal of that year gone by.

⚠ The last line does what a portrait in this book usually does — it names the man only at the end, and it names him with a small reproach. 聖僧不識, the holy monk does not know him: Tripitaka has met the person on whom his whole journey depended and has no idea who he is. ⚠ 當年 — in that year, and this is the hinge of the whole scene. It points back to something the reader has been carrying since Chapter 8 and Tripitaka has never known about. The next passage explains it.

The Great Sage Sun knew him, and called out at once, "Master — this is the Golden-Crowned Great Immortal of the Jade-Truth Abbey at the foot of the Spirit Mountain. He has come out to meet us."

Monkey knows him and Tripitaka does not, which is the ordinary division of labour between these two and is about to become the point of the whole scene. ⚠ 認得 — to know by sight. The two characters here have fused into a single word, so the second keeps its full weight, dé. That is different from the same character following a verb and then handing on to a description, which is how it worked a few pages back when Tripitaka was startled into scrambling off his horse. Position decides. 玉真觀, the Jade-Truth Abbey. A 觀 is a Daoist house, where a Buddhist one would be a different word — so the name has been telling us the denomination all along.

Only then did Tripitaka understand, and he went forward and made his bow.

⚠ 方才醒悟 — only then did it dawn on him. This is the third time in five hundred characters that Tripitaka has been slow: he admired the abbey without dismounting, had to be told off for it, and now needs his disciple to identify the man in front of him. The book is not mocking him. It is doing something more interesting — showing that arriving somewhere holy does not confer any special perception on the person arriving. He still needs telling.