The clash at Xue’s residence and Xuántòng’s passing in meditation

The clash at Xue’s residence and Xuántòng’s passing in meditation turns a mistaken accusation into a multi-sided fight, then breaks its momentum through XuanTong’s sudden renunciation of violence and death. At the house of Xue MuHua, Shaolin monks and members of the Gusu Murong family encounter a group of unfamiliar visitors. Each side reads the other through the injuries, poison, and apparent funeral arrangements surrounding the residence; the resulting uncertainty gives way to combat before anyone establishes what happened to Xue MuHua.

A meeting misread as an attack

The encounter begins when a fragrant scent reaches the people outside the main hall. XuanNan warns that an enemy may be releasing poison, but the scent does not seem to carry the expected effect. A voice calls out to the absent fifth brother and identifies a stranger in his house who claims to be An Lushan. The speaker then summons the other brothers and a sister to reveal themselves. In a burst of light, five men and a woman appear, including a black-bearded man carrying a square board, two scholars, a carpenter with an axe and saw, and a theatrically dressed, painted performer.

Deng BaiChuan recognizes the performer’s makeup as a disguise and introduces himself as a member of the Gusu Murong family, but the visitors have no time to answer. Feng BoE rushes at the performer with his broadsword, interrupting a song in which the performer is acting out the story of the King of Chu and Consort Yu. The black-bearded man intervenes with what he calls his Big Iron Net: a square board that looks like wood but is made of steel. Feng BoE’s sword sticks to it on contact, and he has to gather his strength to pull the blade free. The board is marked like a Go board and strongly magnetic, so Feng BoE changes his tactics and tries to fight without touching it.

The performer resumes his theatrical role, changing from the King of Chu to Consort Yu and using a soft whip against Bao BuTong. Bao BuTong answers by calling himself Han Xin and continues the historical play as a fight. The performance is not merely a distraction: the performer changes his movements and weapons with each assumed character, making his fighting style difficult to predict. While the skirmish grows, XuanNan tries to halt it and clarify the situation, but Feng BoE presses on, weakened by frost poison and intent on ending his fight quickly.

XuanTong’s intervention and debate

XuanTong emerges from the main hall with twin Buddhist knives and accuses the visitors of using poison. He has endured the effects of frost poison for days and, rather than pause to investigate, attacks the two scholars. One dodges; the other produces a judge’s pen and fights back. At the same time, GongYe Gan moves against the axe-wielding carpenter when he sees the scholars in danger. Although his appearance is refined, GongYe Gan’s palm strength is formidable, and the carpenter avoids the first strike before countering with his axe.

One scholar joins the fight without finding the weapon he wants: his copy of the Analects. He searches his clothes while his brother struggles with XuanTong, then begins admonishing the monk from memory. The bookworm invokes restraint, propriety, and the principle of not inflicting on others what one would not wish for oneself. He stays close to XuanTong, shifting position as they move, and his martial skill is strong enough to make XuanTong wary. The monk divides his attention between guarding against the bookworm and attacking the scholar with the judge’s pen, easing pressure on that opponent even as the exchange wears on.

XuanTong rejects the bookworm’s appeals as irrelevant to a Buddhist detached from worldly affairs. Their argument sharpens when XuanTong accuses the visitors of putting deadly poison in a coffin. The bookworm denies knowing who put poison there and counters with a joke about a corpse already being dead. Bao BuTong insists that the coffin contained poison rather than a corpse and accuses the visitors of trying to kill the living. The exchange exposes the central problem of the scene: the Shaolin party believes it has found the source of an attack, while the visitors do not accept that the charge has been established.

The bookworm continues to press XuanTong with Confucian sayings, questioning the monk’s resort to lethal force and urging forgiveness. His words do not immediately stop the fighting. When he turns to argue with Bao BuTong, XuanTong intensifies his attack on the judge-pen scholar. The bookworm then returns to XuanTong, criticizing him for lacking humane conduct; XuanTong responds that literary and ritual teachings cannot sway him. Yet the dispute gradually moves beyond quotation and taunt. The bookworm hums verses associated with the Buddhist monk Kumarajiva, and XuanTong supplies the continuation. The shared exchange joins the argument’s two moral vocabularies rather than leaving them opposed.

Passing in meditation

The recognition changes XuanTong’s response. The bookworm treats the monk’s knowledge of Buddhist teaching as proof that he is capable of compassion, and urges him to release his hatred and return to the right path. XuanTong’s heart is shaken; he praises the insight, chants the Buddha’s name, drops both knives, and sits down with a smile and closed eyes. The judge-pen scholar, who had been fighting him, stops attacking when he sees what has happened.

Xu Zhu asks whether XuanTong’s frost poison has flared up and reaches to support him, but XuanNan tells him not to move. XuanNan checks XuanTong and finds that he has stopped breathing. He prays for the dead, while the other Shaolin monks grieve and prepare to fight the remaining visitors. XuanNan restrains them: he interprets XuanTong’s death as a passing in meditation after perceiving the Tathata, and tells the monks to rejoice in his enlightenment rather than avenge him. The combatants on both sides stop and withdraw, if only briefly. XuanTong’s death thus brings an abrupt change from attempted retaliation to a pause shaped by the meaning XuanNan gives his final act.

The conflict resumes and deepens

The pause does not settle the dispute over Xue MuHua. The bookworm calls for his fifth brother, a physician known as the Enemy of the King of Hell, to come out and save XuanTong, apparently believing that a doctor may still help. Bao BuTong accuses him of pretending to mourn the man he caused to die and attacks. Feng BoE and GongYe Gan, already engaged in separate fights, resume their clashes as well.

Deng BaiChuan seizes the performer and forces him toward the ground. The performer turns and kicks at Deng BaiChuan’s leg; the collision breaks one of the two combatants’ legs, and the performer rolls away, complaining that he has been injured. A woman among the visitors has so far stood aside. Seeing her companions in danger, she challenges the group for occupying her fifth brother’s house and injuring people without first explaining themselves. Deng BaiChuan and XuanNan begin to suspect that these newcomers are Xue MuHua’s sworn brothers and sister. Deng BaiChuan attempts to explain that his party came seeking medical treatment for injured companions, but the woman assumes they killed the physician after he refused them treatment.

The misunderstanding escalates again when the woman flicks her sleeves and Deng BaiChuan is affected by her attack. He nevertheless manages to strike back before collapsing; she is knocked down and also loses the ability to continue fighting. XuanNan, judging that unexplained matters remain and wishing to avoid needless casualties, takes up his staff. He quickly defeats the judge-pen scholar and brings the chessboard fighter’s magnetic board into play against him: the board catches on the staff, allowing XuanNan to lift it and force its wielder to retreat. He then orders the bookworm to lie down; the man complies with a quip, and Shaolin monks hold him.

XuanNan’s intervention subdues three of the opposing experts, but the carpenter remains under pressure from Feng BoE and Bao BuTong. The chessboard fighter finally calls on his sixth brother to admit defeat and asks why the Shaolin party killed Xue MuHua. XuanNan begins to deny that they did, but a zither sounds from a distance before he can complete his answer. The abrupt interruption leaves the decisive question unsettled: the encounter has moved from an accusation, through XuanTong’s death and a temporary cessation of fighting, into renewed combat without yet resolving what happened to the physician.

Significance of the encounter

The episode’s turning point is not a victory in combat but XuanTong’s choice to stop fighting. He arrives already burdened by frost poison and anger, convinced that the visitors are responsible for poisoning the Shaolin party. The bookworm’s appeals initially look like tactical interference, and XuanTong explicitly guards against being distracted. Yet their exchange eventually reaches common ground through Buddhist verse, allowing XuanTong to relinquish his weapons even though the facts behind the alleged poisoning remain unclear. His death brings the other monks to the edge of renewed violence, but XuanNan’s interpretation of it as enlightenment redirects their grief.

At the same time, the episode withholds the clarification that could have prevented the fight. The visitors’ belief that Xue MuHua is dead rests on the funeral lanterns; the Shaolin and Gusu Murong party, for its part, says it came to seek treatment and has not killed him. Neither claim is fully resolved before the next interruption. The scene therefore makes the cost of acting on incomplete knowledge visible: several people are injured, XuanTong dies, and the household’s kin and visitors remain in conflict. His passing changes the combatants’ conduct, but it does not by itself repair the misunderstanding that began the clash.