惟人自作 Man's Own Doing
逐句解 Line by line
So we know that evil sinks through the causes it makes, and good rises by the conditions it meets.
⚠ 因 and 緣 — cause and condition, the two halves of the Buddhist account of why anything happens. A cause is the seed; a condition is the soil and the rain. 業 is karma, the accumulated weight of what you have done. So the line is technical and the emperor states it without a gloss, in a matched pair, the way he has stated everything else.
The beginning of that rising and sinking is a man's own doing, and nobody else's.
⚠ 惟人自作 — it is only what a person makes for himself. Four characters, and they are the moral centre of the document. No grace, no intercession, no bodhisattva. After forty lines of the invisible and the unfathomable, the practical conclusion is that you did it yourself. 端, the beginning or the thread-end — the same character the opening used when it said even the dull may catch the outline of heaven and earth.
Take the cassia growing on a high ridge: only riding above the clouds does it get the dew on its blossom;
⚠ 華 here is the blossom, read huā — and the transmitted text of this preface settles it beyond argument by writing the ordinary flower graph, 花, in this very slot. Read huá it means splendour, which is what it meant six lines ago in pure brilliance. Same graph, two words, and only a variant reading in another manuscript tells you which. 凌雲 — riding above the clouds. It is also the name of the crossing where the Tang monk shed his mortal body two chapters ago, and the novel is quoting a real document that happens to contain it.
the lotus rising out of green water — flying dust cannot stain its leaves.
⚠ The lotus growing clean out of mud is the standard Buddhist image for purity in a filthy world, and the preface uses the harder half of it: not the flower but the leaves, and not mud but airborne dust. 飛塵 — flying dust. It picks up the six dusts from twenty lines earlier, where the dusts were what the senses take in. Cassia on a high ridge, lotus in green water. Two plants, one above the dust and one below it.
The technical machinery arrives without apology: evil sinks through the causes it makes, good rises by the conditions it meets. Cause and condition — the seed, and the soil and rain — are the two halves of the Buddhist account of why anything happens at all.
⚠ And then the moral centre of the whole document, in four characters: the beginning of that rising and sinking is a man's own doing. No grace, no intercession, no bodhisattva coming to fetch you. After forty lines about the unfathomable, the practical conclusion is that you did it yourself.
⚠ The two images that follow are plants, and both are about where a thing stands rather than what it is. Cassia on a high ridge gets the dew because it is above the clouds. A lotus out of green water cannot be stained because dust does not reach it. The argument is entirely about position — which is what the next passage says outright.