覆載以含生 Covering and Bearing, Holding Life
逐句解 Line by line
I have heard that the Two Modes have their images, and show themselves in covering and bearing, so holding all that lives;
⚠ 二儀 — the Two Modes, meaning heaven and earth. The phrase comes out of the Book of Changes and is as old as Chinese cosmology gets. ⚠ 覆載 — covering and bearing. Heaven covers; earth carries. Its second character is read zài, to bear a load, not zǎi, a year. Between them they hold everything alive. And notice how the document opens. Not with the Buddha, not with the scriptures: with the sky and the ground, in the vocabulary of the Chinese classics. The emperor is establishing that he is a Confucian before he says a word about India.
the Four Seasons have no shape, and work hidden through cold and heat to transform things.
⚠ The matching half, and the parallel is exact: Two against Four, have images against have no shape, show against hidden. 四序, the four orders, is the seasons. 化物 — to transform things, the standard phrase for how nature works on what is in it. This is prose built out of matched pairs of lines, and the pairing is the whole technique. Every idea in the piece will arrive twice, once in each half of a matched pair.
So it is that in peering at the sky and looking into the earth, even the common and the dull may know their outline;
⚠ 庸愚 — the ordinary and the stupid. The emperor is being blunt about most people, in a document he is dictating in front of his court. 識其端 — know their beginning, catch their drift. Anyone can see the sky and the ground, so anyone can grasp that much.
but in understanding the dark and seeing through the bright, few even among the wise and the sage exhaust their reckoning.
⚠ And the answering half turns it round. Anyone can grasp the visible; almost nobody, however clever, gets to the bottom of the invisible. 陰陽, the dark and the bright — the shadowed and sunlit sides of a hill, and from there the two principles that make up everything. 罕窮其數 — rarely exhaust their number. 數 here is the count or the ratio of a thing, what a modern reader would call its workings.
The most famous piece of prose in this novel is not by the novelist. The historical Taizong wrote the 聖教序 in 648 for the historical Xuanzang, and the book quotes it whole.
⚠ Look at what it opens with. Not the Buddha, not the scriptures, not India: the sky and the ground, the four seasons, the dark and the bright, in the vocabulary of the Book of Changes. The emperor is establishing that he is a Confucian sovereign before he says a word about a foreign religion. It will be twenty lines before the Buddha is mentioned.
⚠ And the technique is worth naming, because it governs the next eight hundred characters. This is prose built out of matched pairs of lines: every idea arrives twice, once in each half of a matched pair, with the halves answering each other point for point. Two Modes against Four Seasons. Have images against have no shape. Even the dull can see against even the wise cannot fathom.