The merit full and the practice finished, it is fitting to bathe; / the original nature refined and tamed, it accords with heaven's own truth.

⚠ 功滿行完 — the merit full, the practice finished. This is an accountant's sentence and the book means it that way: the pilgrimage has been a ledger from the start, with a fixed number of ordeals to be worked through, and the poem opens by declaring the account closed. 本性, the original nature, is what the whole journey was for. The chapter's own heading promises the saving of it. This is the first of two places in these pages where the poem says the thing the heading promised.

A thousand bitternesses and ten thousand hardships only now come to rest; / the nine prohibitions and the threefold refuge begin the making new.

千辛萬苦 — a thousand bitternesses, ten thousand hardships. Still the ordinary Chinese phrase for having been through the mill, and here it is being used literally. ⚠ 九戒三皈 occurs once in the whole novel, right here. The threefold refuge is the formula by which a person becomes a Buddhist at all — taking refuge in the Buddha, the teaching and the community — and the nine prohibitions are rules of conduct. Naming the entry-level formalities at the very end of the road is the poem's joke: after fourteen years, they are only now properly beginning.

The demons all done with, they truly set foot on the Buddha's ground; / the calamities spent, they therefore come to see the gate of the faith.

魔盡 — the demons finished. It is a flat statement and it is true: there are no more. ⚠ 災消 — the calamities used up. Same bookkeeping as the first line, and it matters later: the pilgrims are working through a fixed count of ordeals, and whether that count has actually been reached is a question the story has not finished with. 沙門 transcribes a foreign word for a religious ascetic, and by extension the whole Buddhist establishment. Reaching it is the object of the exercise.

The dust washed and the filth cleansed, wholly without stain; / turned back to the root and reverted to the source, a body that will not decay.

⚠ 反本還原 — turned back to the root, reverted to the source. The third character is huán, to go back, and not the commoner word written the same way that means still — a distinction this chapter makes thirteen times in the other direction. ⚠ Read the phrase against the chapter's heading and it is the same idea in different words. What the bath is being said to do is not clean a body; it is return a nature to what it started as. The dust of the world that the Great Immortal shook off in his own portrait, two hundred characters back, is the dust these four are now sitting in. 不壞身 — the indestructible body. It is a real term of Buddhist doctrine and it is the state the bath is claimed to produce.

Master and disciples bathed, and before they knew it the sky was growing late, so they took their rest at the Jade-Truth Abbey.

⚠ 不覺天色將晚 — before they knew it, the light was going. Four lines of doctrine about indestructible bodies, and then the afternoon has gone and everyone needs to go to bed. That drop is the book's own and it does it constantly. The last night of the pilgrimage before the mountain is spent in a Daoist guest room, and the sentence that records it is the sort you would write about any inn.