御製榜文 The Imperial Proclamation
太宗既放宮女，出死囚已畢，又出御製榜文，遍傳天下。榜曰：乾坤浩大，日月照鑒分明；宇宙寬洪，天地不容姦黨。使心用術，果報只在今生；善布淺求，獲福休言後世。千般巧計，不如本分為人；萬種強徒，怎似隨緣節儉。心行慈善，何須努力看經；意欲損人，空讀如來一藏！太宗既放宫女，出死囚已毕，又出御制榜文，遍传天下。榜曰：干坤浩大，日月照鉴分明；宇宙宽洪，天地不容奸党。使心用术，果报只在今生；善布浅求，获福休言后世。千般巧计，不如本分为人；万种强徒，怎似随缘节俭。心行慈善，何须努力看经；意欲损人，空读如来一藏！
逐句解 Line by line
When Taizong had released the palace women and freed the condemned, he further issued an imperial proclamation, circulated throughout the realm. The proclamation ran:
御製 means composed by the emperor himself, the highest possible authorship. A 榜文 is a proclamation pasted up in public for anyone to read — the Ming equivalent of a notice board, and the way most people met the state's voice.
Vast are Heaven and Earth, and the sun and moon shine clear in their scrutiny; broad is the universe, and Heaven and Earth will not harbor the wicked and their factions.
乾坤, qián kūn, is Heaven and Earth, named after the first two hexagrams of the 《易經》 — pure yang and pure yin, the two poles between which everything else happens. 照鑒 is to shine on something and inspect it: the sun and moon as surveillance.
Employ scheming and cunning, and the retribution falls in this very life; spread goodness and ask little, and speak not of blessings only in a life to come.
使心用術 is scheming and manipulation. 果報 is karmic repayment. 善布淺求 — spread good widely, ask for little — is the proclamation's core instruction, and note where it puts the settlement: not in some future life but in this one, now.
A thousand clever schemes are not so good as keeping to one's honest station as a man; ten thousand kinds of violent scoundrels — how can they compare with those who follow their lot and live frugally?
本分為人, běn fèn wéi rén, is to be a decent, ordinary person who keeps to their own station; 分 is fèn, one's lot, and 為 is wéi. 隨緣 is to go along with the circumstances karma has dealt you — the opposite of forcing things. 似 is sì.
If the heart practices mercy and charity, what need to labor over the sutras? But if the mind means harm to others, one reads a whole canon of the Tathāgata in vain!
And here is the sting. 看經 is reading the sutras. 如來 is the Tathāgata, "the Thus-Come One," the Buddha's standard epithet and the name this novel usually calls him by; 如來一藏 is one whole canon of his scriptures, the Tripiṭaka. 藏 is zàng, a repository, and 一 is yí. The emperor's conclusion is that a merciful heart needs no scripture at all, and a malicious one gets nothing from the entire canon. In a novel about a journey to fetch that canon, this is a remarkable thing to put on a public notice board.
The proclamation boils the whole underworld lesson down to a public creed of moral action over ritual observance.
Its sharpest line is the claim that a man who means harm reads the entire Buddhist canon for nothing — a striking thing to post on every wall in a novel whose plot is the fetching of those very scriptures. It insists that the sutras are worth nothing without a good heart, quietly subordinating the coming pilgrimage's holy object to plain everyday ethics.
The piece is built in the matched-clause manner of a 表文, the formal memorial submitted to a throne, though here the direction of address is reversed and it is the throne speaking to the realm; the novel treats it as prose rather than as one of its verse showpieces.